Clarence Darrow, Defense Attorney.

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CLARENCE DARROW Defense Attorney

BOOKS BY

IRIS

NOBLE

CLARENCE D ARROW:

Defense Attorney

JOSEPH PULITZER: Front Page Pioneer NELLIE BLY: First Woman Reporter

CLARENCE DARROW Defense Attorney by Iris Noble

Julian Messner,

Inc.,

New

York

by Julian. Messner, Inc. 8 West 4O Street, New York. 18 Published. simultaneously in Ca.na.da by Tine Copp Clark. Publishing Co. Limited. Published.

Copyrigb.t

1958 by

Iris

Noble

Printed in tlie United. States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58-7261

CHAPTER

1

It was noonday and recess time. Under the warm October sun the small country schoolhouse waited with wide open

doors for the youngsters to finish eating their lunches; to finish playing their games and for the bell to ring overhead. But the boy who was responsible for ringing that bell was playing baseball and it was his turn at bat. The bell could wait. .Slender, but sturdy, seventeen years old, he gripped the homemade hickory staff firmly, set his round jaw and then tucked it down into his collar. He moved his feet nervously to get the proper stance.

"Come on, come on throw it!" he yelled. The pitcher threw, fast and hard. The boy to let

it

stepped back

go past him.

The umpire called it. there was an uproar. Both teams came pouring Instantly out onto the field, converging on their target the umpire, a boy no older than themselves. "That was no strike, ya robber!" "Was, too!" "Can't ya see? Ya blind or some" "No such thing " thing?" "That was too a strike "Call it over! Unfair!" "Strike three!"

The boy who had been at bat pushed his way through the knot of excited, milling players. He squirmed through until he was in the center and facing the beleaguered um-

CLARENCE DARROW

8

both hands for quiet. "Calm down. Calm down. We picked him umpire and that means we abide by his decisions. Come on. Let's play ball." He turned away. The others, slowly at first, then running, followed his example, and sought their original places on the field. At the last moment, just as he reached the tree where the rest of his team sat to wait their chance at the plate, the peacemaker turned and grinned at the unhappy umpire "Just the same, it was a ball!" The next player hit a long fly to center field; it was caught. The game was over. The baseball players hurried into the schoolhouse and the bell was rung, calling the younger and slower children in from their games of marbles pire.

He

raised

and run-sheep-run.

The

seventeen-year-old boy gave a last pull to the bell rope, shooed in a couple of little stragglers and then walked slowly up the aisle* The seats were all filled and all faces

were watching his progress from the back to the front of the room. He moved easily, almost ambling. He stepped up to the small platform in front of the blackboards. He took his place behind the desk, the big desk, the teacher's desk. "All right. Let's go to work. First and second grades, page ten of McGufly. The rest of you open your history books to page 75, to George Washington at Valley Forge. Read for ten minutes, then close your books and write out a brief account of what happened."

There was a new boy in the class, a big, hard-muscled boy, as big as a man and almost old enough to be one. He had been astounded when he had discovered who the teacher was. He was even more astonished when he saw the entire schoolroom obediently going about the tasks assigned He nudged the student in front of Mm,

them.

"What goes on around here?" he whispered. "Is that kid the teacher? Why, I could lick him with one hand tied behind me. The last school I went to we had a man teacher-

CLARENCE DARROW

9

and he never dared move an inch without a stick and a strap with him. Even so, we never opened a book les-

a big one

sen

we

felt like it."

His neighbor whispered back. "Yeah. I know all about that strap. We used to have it plenty. We used to fight the teacher all the time, until Clarence came. He's different. We make our own rules now." "I could lick "Wouldn't get a chance to. He'd argue you outa it." There was silence for a while. Then the new boy asked, "What kinda rules you got?" "No hitten anyone smaller than you on purpose. Play all

him"

to outside; work, inside. And don't go talkin* others are trying to study." And putting his words into practice, he turned himself completely around to at-

you want

when

tend to his own book, showing by the obstinate set of his back that he was through talking. The papers on George Washington were handed up; several the teacher returned as unsatisfactory, to be done over.

One

new

of these was given to the

Instantly

he was on

his feet.

boy.

There was menace

he planted himself squarely in the

aisle,

in the

way

in front of the

teacher's desk.

"What's wrong with this? And whatta I care what hap pened a hundred years ago? This is 1874!" Slowly, with deliberate contempt, he tore the exercise paper in two, across across again, and tossed the pieces up into the air. Tension crept into the room. The smaller children huddled into

and

their seats.

There was going

to

be a

fight.

The teacher's shoulder muscles bunched into knots under his shirt. His knees stiffened. He tried to keep his face from showing anything but an alert interest. It would never do to or that let the class see that he was prepared for the fight he was afraid of the fight. He was. The other boy was a head taller than he. "How do you know it is 1874?" he asked.

CLARENCE DARROW

10

The

other was taken aback.

That was

a silly question

"Everyone knows that!" "You only know it because you learned it." The teacher was straining to keep his voice casual. "How do you know this is Ohio? You learned it! How do you know this is the district school of Vernon, near the town o Kinsman?" The whole class picked up the game. They chanted together:

"You learned

it!"

your name? Tom? Well, you see, Tom learning is something that goes on whether you realize it or not. Only, there's a hard way to learn and an easy way. Me, I'm lazy. I want the easy way. And school is the easy way

"You see

what

is

to learn/'

"Schooll" The other boy spat and took a step forward. 'I'm only here 'cause the law says I have to be. My paw has a dairy. I don't need spelling to milk a cow." The teacher laughed with the rest and with the laugh some of the tension seemed to ease. Tom looked around him, still belligerent but a little puzzled. The teacher said, "Look, Tom, you can make trouble here if you want to. But all it will get is a black eye for me and you'll still have no spelling. You don't need spelling to milk a cow. But suppose some other farmer was to say that cow was his and sue you and take you into court for it? You'd have to hire a lawyer. He'd show you papers to read, papers to sign. If you couldn't read and spell and write, then you would have to trust him and you know about how far you can trust any lawyer!" Tom stood for a moment. The words were sinking in slowly. "My paw had trouble with a lawyer, oncet." "Tell us about it. No I'm serious. I'd like to know about it

and

so

would the

class."

Feeling important not quite sure how it happened found himself facing the class and telling the story.

Tom

"Well, the

way

it

happened

my paw

can't read.

A letter

CLARENCE DARROW

came

for

him one day and he threw

it

11

Turned out to new tax only he

away.

be a tax thing and he shoulda paid this never knew he was supposed to." "Your father never read the letter?" "Couldn't. We had to pay a fine. City lawyer came and said he would fight it for us but we think he didn't do nothing but take our money/'

"You see? You learn to read and spell and write, Tom, and you won't be needing lawyers to run your dairy farm for you. You'll be able to handle your own affairs/' The teacher leaned forward. The cowlick in his brown, straight hair

down over his big forehead. "Ignorance is what gets people into so much trouble; schooling can be a help to you. Give it a try, Tom/' All of the fight had gone out of the new boy. He had been

slipped

but at the same time his dignity had been saved. He rubbed the back of his neck with one big fist, in a sort of confused way, glared at a small girl whom he suspected of laughing at him, then walked back to his desk and sat down. With an air of desperate resolve he opened his book and began to read once more about Valley Forge. His neighbor nudged him. "Didn't I tell you he'd argue you outa it? That's Clarence Darrow. He's the best debater in the whole county." "He's a slick talker." The other agreed, mumbling. And Clarence Darrow raised a big book to hide his face from the class and behind it he let out a soundless whistle of relief. If it had come to a showdown he would have taken a licking. Tom was a head taller than he was. It would have meant resigning as teacher; once licked by a pupil he would never have been able to enforce discipline in the school. Then he grinned to himself. He hoped that none of the class could read the title of his book from their seats. It was Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. After the scornful way he had just spoken of lawyers he would talked out of

it,

CLARENCE DARROW

12

have had a hard time explaining why he was studying what was the standard textbook for all the law schools of America. He wasn't quite sure, himself, why he wanted to be a lawyer. He wasn't particularly ambitious. He wasn't burning with any great admiration for the law. He had a good mind, but no brilliant intellect. It seemed to him and he was a little ashamed of this that what was pushing him toward law courts was his insatiable love for arguing and debating and discussing. His older brother Everett was waiting for him after school. Everett, too, was wondering why. "You're really de-

termined about this, Clarence? About going to law school?" The two young men walked slowly down the country lane to the farmhouse where Clarence was boarding. In addition to his salary of thirty dollars a month as schoolteacher, he was given free board and lodgings, moving from one parent's house to another each month. "You don't want to con-

tinue teaching?" It was taken for granted, around Kinsman, that the sons and daughters of Amirus Darrow would just naturally become schoolteachers. Clarence had been given his job

because everyone knew Amirus had no use for what his children learned at school; he crammed their heads with learning from books of his own choosing, at night

"No. I want to get into something more exciting. Do you think there's a chance? I found a lot of lawbooks at home. I don't think Father even knows they are there; he bought

them

once, at auction,

when he bought a

lot of other

things/'

"But you still have to go to college. I know. Well, don't worry about it. We Darrows have to help each other. I'll be starting to teach in Chicago next year and I should be making enough to send you your tuition. And if Mary gets a school, she can give you something, too." Everett put his arm around his younger brother's shoulders and the two

CLARENCE DARROW

13

walked along in silence for a moment. "Tell me, Clarence has it bothered you that people look down on our family? That they despise Father because he can barely make a living for having his nose in a book all the time?" Clarence was embarrassed. He kicked a piece of stubble out of the path and wriggled away from his brother's arm. "Oh, I don't know. I get mixed up but don't think I don't admire him just as much as you do." Not even to Everett could he explain how divided his feelings were: one part of him so proud of his father's intellect, his father's courage to be different and to pay absolutely no attention to what his neighbors thought; the other part of him was just as proud that he, Clarence, was not considered different, that he was popular and well-liked, the best baseball player in Kinsman, the best debater in the county. Sometimes his first self despised the second. Would

he ever have the serene

self-confidence his father had, to

own way, think his own thoughts, speak his own mind go regardless of what anyone else thought or did or how unpopular it made him? his

In his heart he was a little bit afraid and a little ashamed he did not have that courage. But he was persistent. It took more than three years before he could save enough money to go to law school. Everett loaned him most of his tuition. So Clarence was twenty years old when he stopped being a schoolteacher and began life again as a student. For one year he attended the college of law at Ann Arbor, Michigan. This was his only formal legal education. The next year he worked in a lawyer's office twenty miles from his home to think that

in Kinsman, helping the lawyer write briefs, and receiving, in return, guidance for his self-study and much practical

experience. In those times the method was a perfectly acceptable one. There was little emphasis placed on law

degrees or law school graduation. In

May he went before an

CLARENCE DAKROW

14

committee, was examined, passed with just medium satisfactory honors and was fully admitted as an state of Ohio. attorney, licensed to practice in the So on a cool, brisk, windy Monday in March of 1879 a

Ohio

state

young man drove a buggy up the street of Andover village and stopped in front of a row of two-story buildings. He wrapped the reins securely about the dashboard in front of him, dropped the buggy whip into its socket, and then jumped down to the hard-packed dirt street. He reached up to help his companion climb down. Her long skirts were difficult to manage over the big wheel and the long step; besides, she had to use one hand to hold onto her sailor hat which the wind was threatening to carry away. Once down, they both stood for a moment in the street, looking across the big, bare elm tree to the store fronts. "Look, Jessie. There it is." He held her elbow tightly. Across the broad sidewalk Jessie Ohls could see, to the a General Merchandise store, a shoemaker's shop, a land survey office, and a two-story building that housed a bank. But it was the one-windowed office, squeezed in be-

left,

tween the bank and the land survey place, that had the full attention of the two young people. Not that it was much to look at. Its one window was dirty. A torn curtain hung limply behind it, its only purpose being to obscure and not to beautify. The paint on the door was a dirty yellow. But Jessie's eyes were shining as she looked at it, then up at Clarence, then back to the office. She was not daunted by the shabbiness of it. Over the door and brand-new was a board shingle, freshly painted It stuck out a little from the front of the building so as to catch the eye of anyone passing or driving by. It read:

CLARENCE DARROW, ATTY. AT LAW It

was to both of them a shining banner. With that to see

who cared about torn curtains and dirty windows?

CLARENCE DARROW

15

"I'm so proud o you." Jessie said softly. Then she became efficient. "Let's go in and look around. I brought soap and a broom with me they are in the buggy. While you're bringing in your books I'll clean up the office/' "It's nice to know I'm going to marry someone practical,"

he teased her.

Turning the shining new key

in the rusty old lock, openthe into the dark room and lighting the door, stepping ing old kerosene lamp, Clarence suddenly felt that it was a big-

ger threshold he had crossed than just this doorway. He was suddenly grown up and about to take his place as a respectable member of the community, a professional man, a man of standing. "I have a case,"

opened my were dusting the

office.

he told

And

I'll

Jessie proudly. "Before I've even get five dollars for it, too." They

shelves: he, at the top of the stepladder,

while she cleaned out the lower ones of the bookcases. "A young boy was promised a harness for taking care of an invalid. The sick man died but his sons, his heirs, refuse the

boy what he was promised. I'm to handle the case!" "You sound so excited, I think you would handle

it

for

nothing/' "I would, Jessie. There's an excitement about it I just can't describe. I used to think it would just be the thrill of

and challenging the opposing But it's more than lawyer that. This boy earned that harness and I'm going to see to it that he gets it/' "You'll win it, I'm sure/' She straightened up, arching her back to get the kinks out of it. They had been working hard for two hours and already the office was beginning to look spruce and neat. "Then you'll get a lot of business. You've no idea how much people like you and respect you; Mother is so proud of you." standing

up

in a courtroom

like a duel or a contest of wits.

CLARENCE DARROW

16

"Your Dad me."

"He

still

doesn't like the idea of your marrying

doesn't object.

It's just

that

he"

"That he thinks the Darrows are strange people." Clarence answered for her, harshly. "I know the kind of things that are said: that my Father could have been a teacher but he wouldn't because he didn't agree with everything in the

and he wouldn't teach anything he didn't believe in. That he was about to be ordained as a preacher, with a comfortable living, and he turned that down because school textbooks

he wasn't sure he believed in God or, at least, the particular kind of God that church believed in. That, with all his education, he makes chairs for a living and a very poor living, at that. That he spends all of his money for books. And worse still, that my mother, before she died, felt just the same way he did, and the two of them thought it was to study Greek and Latin and Hebrew and inow what was going on in the world of science and philoso-

more important phy than

to see that their kids

had patches on their trou-

sers" "Clarence!"

"I'm sorry." He climbed down the stepladder and took her hand between both of his, apologizing. "I just get angry when I hear my folks being criticized."

your father reads so much that people because he thinks so differently. Everyone else goes to church and he won't. Everyone else around here votes Republican your father says he won't vote according to what any one party says." She frowned. "There's "It isn't because

don't like him.

It's

almost nothing that other people believe in how to raise children, the value of money, immortality of the soul, women's rights that Mr. Darrow doesn't disagree with. And because he quotes Chinese and Greek philosophers, people think he is laughing at them."

Clarence went back to work, but some of the excitement

CLARENCE DARROW

17

of the day was gone for him. His old conflict was back: his secret pride and his secret shame, his secret worry over what was to become of him. Would he turn out to be like Amirus

Darrow, or would he become a

careful, cautious, popular, confined his beliefs strictly to himself and his arguments to the courtroom? He did not know. Jessie's father perhaps Jessie, herself believed he would follow the path of conformity; for this reason the Ohls had

respected

man who

agreed he could marry their daughter.

While he was thinking these thoughts, letting them stumble through his brain in an unhappy, confused way, Jessie was studying his face from below. It was a long, full, oval with deep-set eyes, a large, humorous mouth. And just then, because she was seeing him from a new angle, looking up, she noticed that his mouth was oddly unmatched the lower lip was full and blunt and looked as if it laughed easily and was gentle and easygoing, but the upper one was thinner and seemed to have a sarcastic curl to it. It troubled face,

her.

But the rest of his face she liked, very much. The nose was strong, a no-nonsense kind of nose; the forehead was wide and unlined; the brown hair was straight and vexed with cowlicks front and back. "Have you just realized how handsome I am?" She blushed. "Was I staring? Come down and have lunch. I packed sandwiches." Clarence jumped down. "I wish I was

money

to support us

making enough

now so we could be married right away.

You're such a good cook!" It was a year, though, before his practice had grown

enough to permit them

to

be married.

years of slowly, carefully building larger town of Ashtabula offered

Then

it

was three

his practice before the

up him the

Solicitor at a salary of seventy-five dollars

position of City

a month and the

CLARENCE DARROW

18

own private practice, as well. The young couple promptly moved to lodgings in Ashtabula. Here Clarence's popularity was evident. He became the

right to handle his

center o a large group of friends: friends to go fishing with, friends to play poker with, friends who liked to drop in of

good cooking. He was on but a solid one in a way solid community. People said of him that he would never set the world on fire but he was a good one to turn to in an evening his

to visit

to success.

and

eat Jessie's

A small sucess,

true,

trouble.

Ashtabula was

still

a country town then.

Darrow strolled down the

When

Clarence

street to his office

everyone recogbroad-shouldered figure in his proper and formal dark suit. "Hi there, Clarence!" they would call. "Anything going on at the courthouse today?" What went on in the courthouse was always a matter of public concern. This was before the days of radio, television or the movies; people depended on what happened to their nized his

tall,

own

neighbors for excitement. If two farmers argued over the ownership of a mule the whole town took sides. And if it was to be Clarence Darrow, for the defense, then the

courthouse would be jammed with spectators. There were other lawyers in town more brilliant, but this young Darrow had a way with him. He used simple language that everyone could understand. He could say sarcastic things to the other lawyer, his opposition, but he wouldn't use it on a witness, not even when the witness was for the other side.

And so the whole town would crowd into the courthouse. The pine benches would be crowded with spectators, facing

To

the judge sitting on his high platform, behind his desk. his right drooped the American flag; on his left was the witness stand, that chair where so much of the drama centered;

where witnesses squirmed in embarrassment over being caught in a lie, or made sudden revelations that took even

CLARENCE

DARROW

19

own

lawyers by surprise; where witnesses became angry or cried or made everyone laugh at their simple wit. To their left were the two tiers o seats, six in front and six in back, behind a railing. Here sat the jury. their

Yet everyone knew that these were just stage backgrounds for the central figures, the two main actors: the lawyer for the defense at his table and the lawyer for the plaintiff facing him across the room at another table; both of them in the center of the room, each taking his turn at the witness; at appealing to the judge; at

making

his final plea to

the jury.

When it was Clarence Darrow's turn all eyes were on him and all the room was quiet. He would get up slowly. If it was a hot summer day his coat would be off, his shirt would be sticking to his back with perspiration, his suspenders would be showing. He would loosen his black tie, wait for a moment, then he would start in to talk, slowly and simply: "Gentlemen of the jury, my client, Bill Anderson, says this mule belongs to him. I think so, too. Now here are the " and he would tell the story in a straightforward facts way so that everyone could follow him, every step. The jury, confused by the charges and countercharges and by the fancy words the other lawyer had been throwing words such as "precedents" and "heresay eviat them dence" and "res judicatum" and "prior rights" could now just settle back and let their own common sense tell them

who had been

just

who did own that mule.

Judge Sherman, highly respected throughout several counties, took Clarence into his own office; it was openly said that someday Clarence would be a partner of the Judge's and who knows? might even become a judge, himself.

A

son had been born to the Darrows while they were still in Andover. Little Paul was a healthy, quiet, good-natured

baby and adored by both

his

mother and

father.

CLARENCE DARROW

20

began to look for a home. Lodgings were all right for a young couple just starting in life, but now there were three of them and now, too, a house would prove to everyone how successful, how stable, how secure the Darrows were in Ashtabula. When was it, then, that Clarence first began to realize he was unhappy? When did he first feel that this comfortable life was not for him? Why couldn't he be satisfied with his law practice steadily growing, his week ends of hunting and Jessie

evenings spent gossiping with friends over local

fishing, his

problems and

The son

of

local people?

Amirus Darrow was beginning

to feel a great the lack of hard intellectual stimulation.

lack in his life

He wanted books that would make him think. He wanted to talk to people

who were concerned not

only with the price why should the

of milk from the dairy farms but why farmer^ be having a depression just now

when the country was so rich? Why was it that America was making such great strides forward in mechanical discoveries and industrial progress, yet the farmers he knew, the people who were his them thought and believed just what their their grandfathers had thought and believed? horrified to find that he was even beginning to

friends, all of

fathers

He

and

was

question the Tightness and the fairness of his own profesHe was a lawyer. But did he or his opposing lawyer really care who owned Bill Anderson's mule, or were they enjoying a game of a battle of wits to see who could persuade the jury to his side? When he exposed a poor sinner sion.

and sent a man

to jail,

jails really

it? To protect soteach the sinner a lesson? Did

why was he doing

ciety against that sinner?

To

reform people?

And why why why and

cheat, in the

first

did people steal and kill and lie place? Were the churches right when

they said that man was born in sin and must spend his whole working against his sinful nature? And when a man

life

CLARENCE

D ARROW

21

bread because his children were hungry, wouldn't he, Clarence Darrow, do the same thing to feed his own son if

stole

he were in that situation? Clarence was back in his old conflict: wishing that his father had never taught him to ask such questions and yet unable to resist the probing, the digging underneath ideas and turning them over and over. If he could only talk to Everett

!

But Everett was in Chicago. Clarence Darrow was nearly

thirty years old, jogging along in a small-town routine, carefully hiding his inner unrest, when suddenly two things happened that changed his

whole

life.

He was in court one day, arguing a misdemeanor case in which some boys had stolen fruit from an orchard. The magistrate on the bench, Judge Richards, had been lenient; the boys were let off with a scolding. Darrow picked up his brief case and turned to leave when the judge suddenly called him back. Since court was over, His Honor was no longer the stern "and upright judge; he was informally and casually a man who had for years been Clarence's friend. "Come back here a minute. Not busy, are you?" Judge Richards was hunting for something among his papers. "Got something here might interest you. Came in the mail. It's a book by a Chicago lawyer man with a big reputation. Here it is!" he handed it over his desk to Clarence. Clarence read the title: Live Questions: Including Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims. "By John Peter Altgeld. I don't think I ever heard of him, Judge. But that's the darnedest

title I

"You read

it

ever

victimsl

Might make you

what's he talking about?" think. Altgeld says when

on him; not reforming him. Punishing him. For something he can't help doing. Interesting stuff. Not that I agree com-

we send

a

man

to prison we're just revenging ourselves

CLARENCE DARROW

22

pletely. Can't disagree, either.

You

read

it,

young man. See

what you think." Darrow took it home with him and read it. He sat up all night and read and reread, arguing against every point that Altgeld made and yet finding, when he finished, that he could not argue any more. Altgeld claimed that man had made a society where the many are poor and the few were rich. The laws of the country were the same for both. He held that this was unfair; that poverty and slums and lack of education drove men to

commit tims,

was

its

set

criminals, these men were society's vicunfortunates, and that the machinery of the law

crimes.

As

up to punish them for what they could not help The law should concern itself with getting at the

doing. root of their troubles; instead it hid the victims away in prisons where they could not be seen to trouble the conscience of society.

Dawn was lighting the windows when Clarence put down mind was on fire. The book had answered

the book. His

some of his questions but it had also raised many more. Why were so many people poor, in such a rich land? Could nothing be done about it? Where did lawyers come into the picture? What did Altgeld think men like himself could do? If only he could see and talk to this man who had written such a book! Though he had gone without sleep he had never felt less tired. He was awake and alive, excited as he had never been before in his entire thirty years. Jessie

came

in,

rubbing her

"Clarence Darrow! sitting

up

You

readingl Is

it

eyes.

didn't go to bed

some law

case

You've been you are worried ?

about?"

He started

but Paul was awake and clamoring had to hurry away to fix his porridge; to make for herself and Clarence.

to tell her

for his breakfast. She

then there was coffee

ULARENC

XMRROW

23

While she was busy at the

stove she told him her news. "There's a house I've found that will be just right for us, just big enough and not too big. Not too expensive, either. Will you go to see it today? And if you like it make arrange-

ments to buy it? It's only thirty-five hundred dollars. We must move. It isn't only that we are a bigger family have you taken a good look at our sitting room? Suddenly, in these past few months, it just seems to have filled up with books. That set of Walt Whitman you bought, and all those

European novelists you're so crazy about Flaubert, Zola, and your Henry George books besides all "

others

those

your lawbooks "I know. Books are spilling all over the place." He thought of the new house and all it meant. He knew how much Jessie wanted it. Yet, suddenly, it seemed terrifying to him, as if in buying a house here he was building a fence around himself, cutting himself from men like this Altgeld and from a vision of places where there was excitement and brightness and the keenness of bigger minds than his own; as if he were fencing himself into a corner where life would pass

him

by.

owner of the house. His common house and just what he needed. The owner would take five hundred in cash and let him

But he went

sense told

to see the

him it was a

fine

make

easy monthly payments. All day he walked around in a kind of daze. The words of Altgeld were ringing in his ears; a longing for something more, something bigger than he had found in Ashtabula was leading and beckoning him on yet at the same time he was drawing out five hundred dollars from the bank and

up a legal form of sale for the house. was He leaving his office when the owner of the house came to see him. "I'm sorry, Mr. Darrow. I'm afraid I can't sell the house writing

to you."

CLARENCE DARROW

24

"Why

not?"

well, she see, my wife is half owner. And she used to live in Kinsman, and you know how people get funny ideas, but she says she won't sell to a Darrow." "She doesn't think a Darrow could make those monthly

"Well, you

payments,

is

that it?"

"I tried to tell her

you were a

successful lawyer.

Not

like" "Not like my father who never owned any property at all. Well, you go back and tell your wife I wouldn't take her house even if she wanted to sell. I'm not going to be here " long enough to care where I live "You leaving town?" "Yes." The idea seemed to come full-grown, fully planned, into Darrow's head. "My family and I are leaving this week for Chicago!"

CHAPTER

Their

first

2

night in Chic&gff, wtfen a scared but deter-

mined Clarence and a much-bewildered

Jessie

had

finally

located a couple of shabby rooms to live in, Everett Darrow came to see them. He was plainly astonished at the abruptness of their move and just as plainly delighted that it had

been done. "I've been saying for a long time that you were wasting your ability in a small town," he told his younger brother. "But I rather expected you to make plans, first. I thought you would get in touch with some law firm and wait until they asked you to join them." Jessie held Paul on her lap and listened. It was hard for her to understand Clarence's sudden decision. The noise, the bigness, the speed of the city was not nearly so frightening to her as was the feeling that this husband of hers was a stranger to her. She could not understand him. And it was evident he could not understand himself. "I don't know exactly why, Everett, but I just had to get out of the rut I was in. It seemed to me that here I could find something, some answers look, I've been a lawyer now for nearly nine years. I believed what I was told: that everyone was responsible for his or her actions, and if a man was a criminal, it was his fault. But I've seen people driven to 25

CLARENCE DARROW

26

crime. I've seen that people are sometimes ignorant of the forces that moved them to one action or another. I've seen

money, or the lack of money, do terrible things to what we call moral values. Yet the law is blind to these motivations; it must imprison or free people according to set rules which are drawn up to protect one part of society from another."

"Have you given up the law?" "No. But I want to understand what it is I am doing." Everett wandered around the small room and examined, with a quick glance, the boxes of books only half-unpacked. "I see youVe kept up your interest in other things besides " the law literature, science, economics "That's the other reason I had to come here. I had no one to talk to, no one who read the same books I did or " cared anything about poetry or the stage or politics "No one to argue with, you mean." Everett smiled. "I should have been the one to live in the small town, not you. As long as I have the books I don't need to discuss them with anyone. You do. I think you might find the kind of people you are looking for at the Henry George Club or perhaps the Sunset Club. I've gone to a few of their meetings they shout, they debate, they build a new Utopian world each night and tear it down the next. They are a lively bunch." Clarence walked the length of one quiet city block with his brother, when it was time for Everett to go. The hour was late; the city was sleeping. Even so it seemed to him there was almost as much movement as many horse carts

and buggies, lit

as

many people on

at twelve in

Chicago

the street, as

as in the busiest

Saturday evenings in the country. "Do you think I've taken leave of

my

many lamps

and

senses?

earliest of

That I'm

crazy?" he asked Everett, bluntly.

"No. I think you'll always have something of the small town about you, Clarence. Living in a small town may have

CLARENCE DARROW

27

done you a lot of good, brought you close to people in a way that our family never was. But this is where you belong. The city is where things are happening. And if you need money, you know you can call on me." The next day Clarence found a tiny, little, one-room office for himself. He arranged his books in it, sat for a while feeling strange, almost ridiculous. To start all over again and try to build a practice where he was totally unknown!

No wonder

Judge Sherman and the rest of the people in Ashtabula had been horrified! Here he was no clients, no reputation, a complete stranger in Chicago. A lawyer can't go out and ask for jobs or for a practice. He has to wait until it comes to him. And how was he going to support his family? Finally he could sit still no longer. He put on his hat and went out into the streets. The city of Chicago seemed huge to him. Buildings were crowded together, one on top of another, and some of them were eight and nine stories tall. Most of the streets were paved. There were no tree-shaded walks, no quiet lanes. People thronged the sidewalks: men in sober business clothes, workers in overalls. And before he had walked more than a dozen blocks he became aware that this was the fastest-growing city in America. He felt the influence of the railroads on the city. With his own eyes he saw what he had already heard: that Chicago was the great center from which railroads sent their webs of tracks to every part of the country. And over those

same

railroads

came the raw materials

for Chicago's factor-

made Chicago

the "stockyards of the nation"; the merchandise for the huge stores that were now being built; and the lumber and the stone for the ies;

the carloads of cattle that

great mansions that were rising near the lake shore. His mind confused and his heart pounding, he listened to

the roar of the

city.

The

shout of newsboys, the quick con-

CLARENCE DARROW

28

versation of people passing him, the clatter of hooves in the street as every kind of horse-driven vehicle passed him. He let the smell

and the touch and the

feel of the city get to

him and he thought to himself: / am right. I belong here. Then he saw the slums. There had been poor people in the country where he was born; the Darrows were considered poor. But they had always had a decent house to live in

and space to move around

cleanliness for a

way

of

life.

in

and enough food

to eat

and

What he saw now shocked him

he was never to forget it: the terrible tenements, unpainted and uncared for by landlords, the children shivering in rags, the squalor and filth of streets on which the city would not spend cleaning money, the fear in an old woman's face, the desperation in the eyes of a beggar. "They live like animals!" he stormed to Jessie. "I could understand it if there was a famine in America and no food for them. But they starve in the midst of a feast! This is one of the richest cities in America and yet they live in those so deeply

shacks!"

How much Jessie wanted to say: Let's go home! Let's go back to Ohio! But she didn't. She knew that Clarence was seeking something and she wanted him to have it. She was only afraid that he might fail here and be forced to go whipped and beaten. There was every reason to be afraid. Weeks went by months and only a handful of clients found their way to Clarence's office door. Their savings were rapidly going; they scrimped by eating the cheapest food and wearing overback,

coats at night to save fuel for their tiny apartment.

Clarence found himself swinging between the despair of and the great, wild excitement of seeing some

his finances

come true. There was the day he walked into John Altgeld's office Altgeld who would some day be the governor of Illinois. In the older lawyer's waiting room he had sat with a long, long of his dreams

CLARENCE DARROW line of other people, all

portant

29

wanting to get in to see the im-

man and he had

felt like

getting

up and

leaving.

Who was he, unknown, a one-time country lawyer and now man without any practice at all, to hope that Altgeld would spare him a moment? But he stayed, clutching to his courage and to the precious copy of Altgeld's book.

a

Finally

it

man behind

was his turn.

He

walked into the

the big desk did not bother to

rise;

office.

The

the face he

turned to Darrow was fierce, frightening, and cold. Darrow could understand why people admired Altgeld's mind and yet so few sought his friendship. "What is it? What is it you want?"

Darrow found himself growing a

little angry at the re"I'm not here for favors. I'm not a client. I'm ception. any a small-town to thank you for somewho wants just lawyer thing." He brought out the book and laid it on the desk between them. "For this. Your book. I wanted to tell you how much it has meant to me." Altgeld got slowly to his feet. His eyes were still cautious, still searching, but his mouth was smiling a shy and sensitive, appealing smile. "Did you really read it? I do not believe one hundred persons have read it and very few of those have agreed with me. Please sit down." Clarence told him, in detail, how he had been given the it had opened up for him, the questions had answered for him, the further questions it had raised for him. "How much, Mr. Altgeld, can society blame a man for his heredity? Say a child is born ugly and deformed; can we blame him for stealing what little happiness he can get? And what about the mind, hidden away, that is deformed at birth? Are we lawyers to prosecute these people and help the courts punish them for something they can-

book; the questions it

not help?" Altgeld leaned forward, eagerly. what about a man's environment?

"You

see that, too?

And

A child is born normal,

CLARENCE DARROW

30

at the healthy. He grows up stunted by poverty, enraged him from has taken unfairness of a world that everything and given too much, to another is he to blame that he be-

what was your name, comes a criminal? I tell you, Mr. of this world we have we ashamed Barrow are Mr. again? made; we are ashamed that poverty exists; we revenge ourselves on these unfortunates who are our victims." The two men talked on and on. Altgeld's secretary came in to say that important people were waiting to talk to him.

He waved him "This

away.

so rare a thing for me," he told Clarence. "Just talk to someone who cares as I do about the law

is

to sit and and about

People look up to lawyers and judges, but lawyers and judges are human they are ambitious, they want power and money and position only a few of them care about defending the innocent and about understanding the guilty/' In a moment of quick intuition, Clarence knew that he had won a friend. They had come together as strangers but in this short time had learned respect for each other and something more. That something more was affection. By the time he left, Altgeld was begging him to come back and talk again. The justice.

two men,

so far apart in worldly position, were friends. was a strange, upside-down feeling to go from that office to his own and to feel the cold certainty of failure in around his one to know that a few room; dosing shabby streets away Jessie was about new shoes for little worrying Paul. The days were hard. But, at night, other dreams were coming true. Everett took him to a meeting of the Sunset Club, held at the home of one of its members. They walked in from the coldness of the evening outside to find themselves in a brightly lighted, warm, inviting room, being greeted with It

equal warmth and hospitality. Clarence's

first

impressions

CLARENCE DARROW were confused: there seemed to be several dozen people

31 all

talking at once, all talking at the top of their voices, little groups forming, shifting, reforming again as people drifted

from one discussion or one argument to another. What he liked best was that these seemed to be people who could laugh as easily and quickly as they could flare into passionate outbursts of oratory.

He was

passed along and welcomed from one group to

another.

it

"And what do you

think of socialism, Mr. Darrow? Isn't

your opinion that

?"

"Dostoevski of the

human

is

the only writer with a real understanding don't you agree, Mr. Darrow?"

soul

And five minutes later he would find himself in still another group: "So you're a lawyer, Mr. Darrow? What do you think will be the

on this country of President McKinley's high should be some protection for us, shouldn't it?" wonderful to be with people who cared about such

effect

tariff bill? It

How

books, social theories, politics! How wonderful for Clarence to be able to talk once again! "Protection against

things

what? Against our friends? At a time like this, when trade barriers between nations should be broken down, a handful of rich monopolists persuade the President to place a tariff " so there will be no competition for the sale of their goods The chairman of the evening rapped for order. He stood in front of the round library table and introduced their guest speaker: Jane Addams. And when she had finished telling them of her work among the poor, the immigrants,

who came

to Hull House for friendship and help, there was a discussion period and then, once again, they broke up

into informal groups to talk.

Clarence began to sort out some of the people there. The Sunset Club attracted writers, teachers, clergymen, musicians, social workers, political theorists of all kinds.

CLARENCE DARROW

32

when he realized that to be their next him these wonderful people had asked in Literature and speaker. He was to talk on "Realism

He went home in a daze,

Art."

How had

that

especially

happened? Were they

just

being kind

to a newcomer? He could not

know the instant and powerful impression he had made on them. They had seen in him, immediately, a rare combination of simplicity and shrewdness, an open, good-natured face that was sometimes contradicted by the way his eyes would narrow and by his sarcasm when he thought that something said was stupid or wrong. Many of them responded to a sweetness in him and his own happiness in being with them; others liked him because he had a sharp tongue; still others were astounded that this country lawyer should know so much of culture and science. He went to meetings at the Henry George Club. This was a different sort of thing, entirely. Here the people agreed on one single political idea Henry George's idea that the solution to all economic problems was to have no private ownership of land; that landlords were to act almost as rental agents and be paid out of the tax on land. The government was to be supported by this single tax this tax on land not on income or property taxes of other kinds.

Clarence Darrow soon lost faith in this theory.

He

saw

more and more America was becoming an industrial empire, not an agricultural economy, but he stuck with the Club because it gave him an opportunity he could not get that

elsewhere.

As a political group, the Henry George Club hired large and spoke to thousands of people, not only on their one philosophy but also on local political affairs. He wanted this chance to be able to speak. It was a long time in coming. Month after month he sat alone in his tiny office and read. The few clients he had

halls

CLARENCE DARROW

33

only took up a fraction of his time. He began to despair. He should never have left Ashtabula. He had been a crazy fool; worse than that because he had dragged his wife and child into this life of poverty great deal of money by now.

and

debt.

He owed

Everett a

Then, suddenly, his chance came. He was asked to appear on the same platform, at a large meeting, with Henry George.

That night he arrived at the hall very early. He was afraid would ruin this chance; afraid of his own daring to think he had anything to say that would to be late; afraid that he

interest this

huge

hall full of people.

He

was dressed care-

fully: a dark, heavy, almost formal suit, a high, starched and very white collar, a flowing black silk

stiffly

tie as

and daring. As he sat up on the stage and watched the audience pour in, what little courage he had melted away. His name was last on the program; this meant he had to sit in torture, thinking about the time when he would have to get up on his feet, listening to the oratorical eloquence and ease of

just a touch of dash

the other speakers

man was a He spoke in

This

especially to Henry George. fine lecturer. He was the star of the eve-

. .

.

grand terms, spinning before the fascinated audience an idealistic picture of what life could be under his economic theory how their problems would all be solved. When he finished there was a tremendous ovation. It was now Clarence's turn. He got to his feet and walked to the front o the stage. He waited for the noise to quiet down but it didn't. It grew. For the audience the show was over. They were getting up from their seats, turning to talk to each other, making their way with loud shufflings of feet

ning.

to the exits. The newspapermen had put away their pencils and notebooks; they were walking out, too. The chairman, touched Clarence on the arm. "I'm sorry,"

CLARENCE DARROW

34

he whispered, "but you see how it is. We'd better skip your speech and close the meeting." For a second Clarence wavered. All his fear and nervousness and his prudence tempted him to agree. It would be so easy to give up now and wait for another chance. But would there be another chance? He shook off the chairman's arm. He took a huge, deep breath and then let it out into something that was almost a shout:

"People of Chicago!" he cried. "You have heard Mr. George speak of the future! But what of the present? What of our own city of Chicago? We are facing a city election are you going to choose the men you want men who will help you? or have them chosen for you? Are you the masters of this city

or

its

victims?"

The

audience stopped dead in its tracks. All noise and conversation stopped. They did not know this man on the platform, but he was saying the same things they had just been whispering to each other! Again Clarence raised his voice so that it filled the entire

He had

thrown away the carefully prepared little had he planned to give; he was improvising now, speech the taking very points that Henry George had made and

hall.

down to earth, driving them home to these that their heaven might be in some future making people but that there were immediate problems they must face, bringing them

right now. With his lawyer-trained mind he organized and described the political situation of the city. "The city administration is

corrupt and rotten!" he told them and detailed the scanand bribery and the mismanagement. "We need a new

dals

mayor!" he cried, and described the kind of should be that mayor. Slowly,

making

as little stir

and

audience had slipped back into their

man who

noise as possible, the seats.

The newspaper-

CLARENCE DAJRROW

35

men brought out their pencils and their note pads. When a man coughed his neighbor hushed him; all attention was who was speaking to them in simple, words of the things they wanted to hear. straightforward Even when Darrow became most passionate there was still a homely, easy way about his language. They could not know that his knees were trembling, uncontrollably, and that the back of his shirt was wringing wet and that his hands were shaking so that he was forced to open his coat and grab onto his suspenders for support. Not a person moved until he was finished. Then so fixed

on

this stranger

so unbelievable! wildly, wonderfully sweet to his ears! came the thunderous roar of applause. It was as great an ovation as there had been for George, himself.

The

next day Clarence was

still

in a daze

and

still

won-

dering how he had

ever got the courage to do what he had done, still wondering, even, if it had meant anything. Then he read the newspapers. His name was in the headlines! He

had received almost an equal amount of space and attention as had the main speaker, Henry George. It was a great lift to his pride. He had been a nobody and now he was a Somebody. For an entire week he felt on top of the world.

Then Jessie reminded him, once again, that there was no money left in her purse. Once again he had to go to Everett for another loan. And more months went by; it was now two years since he

had

left

Ashtabula; there were only a few

new clients; no one in that vast audience who had heard him brought him a case to try. "There's Paul, dear." Jessie had been staunch and brave, but she was desperately worried. She was homesick, too, for all her friends in Ohio and their quiet, peaceful, secure life there. "We must think of him. A five-year-old boy needs so much." "I know. I guess I've made a big mistake. I hate to admit

CLARENCE DARROW

36

defeat but I guess 111 have to." It was wretchedly painful for him to face his failure. "I'll finish this one case I'm on now

and then we will go back and start again in Ashtabula." Never had his future seemed so gloomy to Clarence Darrow as on the day he sat in his office, alone, working on some notes for the small case he was handling in the Municipal Court. The notes were really quite complete and he was just going over them for something to occupy his mind. The knock on the door startled him. A knock on that door was a rare thing. It was a messenger boy, with a letter. And the letter asked would Mr. Darrow, if he wasn't too busy, be kind enough to call upon Mr. DeWitt C. Cregier? DeWitt C. Cregier was the newly elected mayor of Chicago. Clarence had no idea what this was all about; he had never met Cregier, never even been introduced to him. But he did indeed have plenty of time and he was certainly not too busy to permit his curiosity to find out what the Mayor wanted.

He

presented himself at the Mayor's office and, to his great surprise, was shown through a lobby crowded with

people straight into His Honor's presence. The Mayor shook hands with him. Asked him to sit down. Made pleasant remarks about the weather. Then, "Mr. Darrow, would you be at all interested in working for the city? As special Assessment Attorney?"

Darrow had no idea what an assessment attorney was. He at the offer, he had no ideas in his head

was so astounded at

all.

He

sat

still,

staring at this unbelievable

had made such an unbelievable

proposition.

man who

Somebody was

offering him a jobl

Cregier misinterpreted that look. "I know I know. The salary isn't much for a man like you. It's only three thousand dollars a year, but it may lead to bigger things."

Three thousand dollars!

It

was a fortune.

It

was food and

CLARENCE DARROW clothes

and rent

it

was

victory,

not failure

37 it

was

"I'll

"

be happy to accept, yes 111 be glad, Mr. Cregier he stuttered, getting the words out. "Fine. You'll go on the payroll today. Well talk about it more, tomorrow, but right now I'll explain a few of the I'll

details."

Darrow was glad to hear the Mayor's voice running on, even though he couldn't understand a word of it. Slowly the inner turmoil quieted down until he was able to ask the question that was perplexing him: "How did you ever happen to hear of me, Mr. Cregier? What made you seek me out for this job?" The Mayor smiled. "Don't you know? Why, I heard you making that speech that night with Henry George." He did not add that he felt Darrow had helped him to get elected. Nor did he ever tell Clarence that John Peter Altgeld had spoken to him of this fine young man. Altgeld had seen through Darrow's pride to his poverty and his need. Dinner that evening, with occasion, but it is significant

Jessie and Paul, was a joyful for their future relationship

with each other that Clarence found his real celebration, his chance to let off the fireworks sizzling inside him, with his friends of the Sunset Club. He went to them immediately after dinner.

The work

of special Assessment Attorney proved to be In a few months when the Assistant Corporation very easy. Counsel for the city of Chicago resigned, Darrow was given his place and his salary of five thousand dollars a year. In twelve months he was no longer the assistant, he was the Corporation Counsel at another salary raise. His jumps up the ladder came astonishingly quick. And if one forgot die many, many patient hours he had spent

in that

first

lonely

office,

ingly easy and simple.

reading and studying

astonish-

CLARENCE DARROW

38

He became

a

minor

figure of importance in the city.

He

dressed well. His slender body had filled out and Clarence Darrow was now a big man. few lines had appeared at

A

the corner of his eyes; his jaw had grown hard and solid; there were expressive folds, now, at the corners of his mouth that could convey even better than before the gentle kindli-

which he greeted most people and on the other hand, at other times the hard and bitter, lashing words with which he fought his opponents in court. After four years of working for the city there came an ness with

from the Chicago and North Western Railway. They wanted Clarence Darrow to be their General Attorney. It was an offer that Darrow simply couldn't understand. He was astounded. Why should they want him? He was not modest; he knew he was an extremely capable lawyer. But he was not the kind that he imagined a railroad would want:

offer

the

slick, clever,

He

unscrupulous kind.

was troubled,

How could he

by the decision he was making. work for a railroad company when

too,

possibly

he believed that such big monopolies as railroad companies were guilty of keeping their workers on starvation wages? Not many of the questions he had brought with him to Chicago had been answered, but he had become more and more convinced there was a wide and dangerous gulf between the employer and the worker. If he had any convictions, they

leaned toward socialism as the ultimate answer.

"Socialism," he was to say, "seemed logical and profound. Socialism recognized that if man was to make a better world it must be through the mutual effort of all human units; that it must be by some sort of co-operation that would include all the units of the state."

He was skeptical of the methods by which such a socialist world was to come. He was too much of an individualist to join any party that advocated socialism. "But how can I take a job with you, feeling as I do?" he

CLARENCE DARROW

39

asked the railroad officials. "I think the railroads have one of the worst records of any big company, in exploiting their workers and using up their strengths and skills for as little as possible and then throwing them out to starve when they get old.

The your

Why do you officials

want me, thinking

as I do?"

"We know know you have a

were blunt about their reasons.

reputation as a radical.

But we

also

reputation for honesty. People believe the railroads are thieves. People trust you as they might not trust some other attorney. Frankly, we're buying, not only your brains,

but

1

your reputation/

"To

cover up dishonesty?" Darrow, too, could be blunt. "No. You will find that the job will be one you can do with honor. You might even find that it gives you an advantage from which to help other human beings. Give it a try. After all, you can quit whenever you want to." There seemed to be no good reason why he should not take the job, if things were as they said. Besides, he was getting tired of the rut of the city job. So for many months Clarence Darrow, this

man so full of inner contradictions, was to live a life that seemed sharply divided into two separate camps. As attorney for the railroad, even though he frequently could settle cases in the favor of an injured workman, he drew a fat salary check from the

railroads,

worked

for them, argued in courts for

them.

Then at the Sunset Club or the Henry George Club he was equally vigorous in denouncing the whole way of life of the wicked monopolies of railroads, steel, oil, and lumber. In the evenings he would listen to the anarchists: "We want a world," they said, "where there are no classes, no employers, nor governments. No private ownership. If the railroad owners get in the way of our new world, we will smash them and the government, too." Darrow would applaud, though he felt the anarchists

CLARENCE DARROW

40

were a bunch of hotheads who would tear down before they knew how to build something new. He would listen to the social reformers: "All that America needs is a little reforming. If we can appeal to the kind heart of the industrialists and also if we can get the workers to speak better English and improve their skills, then we will have the perfect society that will

work together in harmony," Clarence Darrow snorted. He liked his railroad bosses; he was affectionately fond of some of them, as individuals, but he had no illusions that they were suddenly going to stop trying to squeeze the last bit of work out of every single worker they had and the last bit of profit out of every dezd they made. Nor did he think that education for the workers, fine as it was, would answer all problems. There were evenings at the Sunset Club where the tempers flared and the different theorists raged at each other. Clarence loved it: the hot disputes and the passionate words, the excitement as each man and woman tried to convince the others that he was right. He liked the evenings that were gay, sometimes, and the evenings that were richly, profoundly moving, when a professional actor read a play of Shakespeare's or a chapter of Dickens. He also liked having a professional status envied by others.

buy

He

paid, and being able to toys for Paul. It was a good was a success as a lawyer, and that his

liked the

money his job

fine clothes for Jessie

know he family were now living in

feeling to

Once Darrow:

and

comfort.

again, as in Ashtabula, people said of Clarence there's a who is going places. Not too far, not

man

anything spectacular, but in a good, solid, respectable way he was making a name for himself as a Chicago lawyer. And once again he was to throw all of it out the window. The son of Amirus Darrow was now to be confronted with the greatest inner conflict of his life.

CHAPTER

e

The Pullman

workers in Chicago were out on strike. had Wages dropped below the point where a man could feed his family and when George Pullman announced still another wage cut, his workers who were members of the American Railway Union put a picket line around the railroad shops that made the Pullman cars, and settled down to battle for a living wage.

The American Railway Union was

led by

Eugene Debs,

At

that time the railway workers were just beginning to organize; just beginning to demand good wages and good living conditions. There were not many Pullman workers but Debs called on the other railroad workers to support their strike; all over the country there was a solid refusal to trains or load freight cars if that train also pulled

work on

it a Pullman car. Darrow and the other members of the Sunset Club

with

watched the early days of the strike with great interest. Could these few men hold out against the wealth and power of their employer? The workers, as a condition of their employment, had been forced to live in Pullman town; forced to pay rent to Pullman for their flimsy shacks; forced to buy their food, at high prices, from Pullman stores. Pullman owned them, 41

CLARENCE DARROW

42

body and soul

literally

since their churches

were

also

on

his property.

Darrow watched and waited.

When

the entire union

to help the small group of Chicago strikers, he knew be trouble. And when the Federal government would there

moved

issued an injunction against the strikers, he of Illinois.

went to Altgeld,

now Governor

"It's illegal!" he stormed. "When the government issues an injunction, ordering the strikers to stop striking, this means the government has taken sides in the dispute and

favored the employers. Why doesn't the government issue an injunction against Pullman for starving his workers? Washington should be neutral, if it can't play fair." "I have wired the President that I, as Governor of this state, see no need for injunctions. I shall keep on trying but my authority is set aside by this intervention of the Federal government." Altgeld was tired; he was angry; he was feeling the weight of defeat and the fear of violence. He knew the workers would be enraged by what seemed to them so unfair an action; they would not stop their strike and this would lead to violence. Darrow went back to Chicago from the Governor's mansion in Springfield with a heart and mind so torn that at moments he seemed hardly sane. How could a man like himself, believing in one thing the right of labor to organize, to strike for better conditions go on working and from the railroads were prepared to go who taking money to

any length to provoke violence, to force President Cleveland to come in on their side, just to break the strike of men who had been beaten to their knees and were struggling to stand up like men? Because, now that the Railway Union was supporting the strikers, all the railroad owners were

supporting

Pullman.

When

he arrived home

Jessie

opened the door. There

CLARENCE DARROW

43

he fright in her face. "A man is waiting to see you wouldn't give his name," she whispered. "He came with a

was

from a friend of yours from your Sunset Club." Darrow walked into the living room. A tall man rose slowly from the chair where he had been sitting, waiting, but he made no move to shake hands; he did not smile. For

letter

a minute, he did not even speak. And Clarence's first glimpse of him brought an uneasy premonition of trouble. Where had he seen this man before? From what newspaper photograph did he recognize this tall, thin, fair man, clad in a neat tweed suit stiff

and wearing that high, old-fashioned

collar?

Then

the stranger smiled sweet, kind, humorous gentle,

and spoke. The smile was but the words were a thun-

derclap.

my name

"Mr. Darrow, ask you to

work

for

is

Eugene Debs.

I

have come to

me."

Clarence could not answer. He motioned his guest to sit down and he pulled up a chair for himself. "I know you must think it most peculiar, Mr. Darrow,

you for help. You are employed by my They pay you well and I cannot promise to pay you anything but your expenses. I have nothing to offer you except trouble, a terrible burden, perhaps disgrace nothing, that is, except a clear conscience for you and the you will be doing a fine thing. Nothing exknowledge " the gentle voice took on depth and strength and cept volume "the gratitude of thousands of working men and women." " a clear conscience 1" Clarence Darrow felt as if his father was speaking to him through this man. "What, exactly, do you want me to do, Mr. Debs?" "I want you to defend the union against the injunctions. Defend the strikers who disobey that injunction. Perhaps you will even wind up defending me." that I have

enemies.

come

to

CLARENCE DARROW

44

Clarence got up and walked aimlessly around the room. Paul ran in from the hall, shouting joyfully to his father. He stopped short when he saw there was a strange man in the room and when he saw, next, the expression on his father's face. There were few times when Clarence was too

busy to play with his son; Paul knew immediately that this was one of them. He excused himself and vanished to his own bedroom. Clarence Darrow had scarcely realized that his son had even been there. What could he do? What could he say to Eugene Debs? Didn't Debs realize how impossible ? "Let me think about this. Let me sleep on it. But tell

me what made that I

and

you come to me? Why would you suppose would give up what I have, throw away my ambitions

my

success, to

"To defend the other

"

was some question. Some of was crazy to think that a highly

us? Yes, there

officials

thought I

paid executive of the railroads would help us against the railroads. But you have a name for honesty and fairness and

you are a member of the Sunset Club. Trade union people have heard you speak. They tell me you are sympathetic to our cause." Sympathy was one thing; sacrifice was something else. Darrow saw his visitor leave; thanked him politely for coming; told him he would think over his request. But uppermost in his emotions was a furious anger at this tall man with his quiet manner and his gentle smile and his incredible,

impossible,

brazenly

inconsiderate

demand.

How could this man dare to come into Darrow's own home and tell him what his duty was, where

his

moral obligations

lay?

No human

being had the right to do this to another: up to a mirror and force him to

to hold his conscience

examine

He

it!

talked to Jessie for a while but he stopped

when he

CLARENCE DARROW

45

he was contradicting himself with every word he spoke. He had no right to burden her with this. It was his

realized

problem. All night long he wrestled with it. He could not sleep. The next morning, still undecided, he went to his office. Oh, he had decided something he was not going to be such a fool as to do what Debs wanted. But he had not yet resolved this with his heart; he had still to find all the smooth reasons that would let him say "no" with a clear conscience.

He

walked through the corridors of the big, impressive office building of the Chicago and North Western Railway, slowly climbed the steps that led to the legal department. He was a big man, over six feet tall, but this morning there was a stoop to his shoulders that made him seem less big than usual.

Two men

railway executives

passed

him on

the

stairs.

He

caught a fragment of their conversation. "...very good news.., we've got Olney to appoint Edwin Walker special assistant attorney general to handle "

those injunctions ".

.

.

Walker?

isn't

agers' Association?

"

he the lawyer

for the General

Man-

Clarence Darrow climbed slowly on. Their voices drifted " same man. Yes best thing Walker can back to him: " be depended upon to

Something tight and powerful and furious exploded inside Barrow's chest He turned sharply around and looked

men. Edwin Walker! The lawyer for the General Managers' Association to be special representative of the

at the two

government to handle the injunctions. A man employed by an association pledged to fight trade unionsl This was too much. A minute later Darrow was in the office of Marvin Hughitt, the president of the Chicago and North Western.

CLARENCE DARROW

46

"I quit!" he stormed. "I'm through. You have my resignation as of this moment. It wasn't enough that the employ-

the power, all the organization against nothing but the courage and the bravery of starving men. It wasn't enough that the railroads use the government to come into this fight, on their side. But now they even make sure the strikers won't get any ers

have

on

their side

all

the money,

all

possible chance of being treated fairly; they see to it that one of their own, a man employed by an employers' association, is

appointed to handle the courts that will be set

to try the strikers for strikingl" "The injunction will save bloodshed

up

and the destruction

of property," Hughitt tried to reason.

"Your precious injunction is going to set off riots and murder and it's putting a match to a burning fusel" Darrow strode to the door. "I mean it when I say I am This is the last you will see of me." "But where are you going? What are you going to do?" He hadn't known, himself, until that second. Now that he did know, it seemed right and inevitable and the only possible thing he could ever have done. "I'm going to represent Eugene Debs and the union." It seemed the final piece of insanity in an insane day that he heard Hughitt calling after him, "After we've broken this strike and wiped out the American Railway Union, we want you to come back." When Clarence Darrow came out onto the Chicago streets he was a changed man. Once again his life had met the crossroads and abruptly turned in a direction whose ends he could not see or imagine. He only knew that in that direction he must go. All his anger was gone and all his indecision. As attorney for the Union, his mind was slowly filling with all of the problems, the legal maneuvers, the difficulties that he was quitting.

facing.

CLARENCE DARROW

At

his favorite newsstand

47

he bought

all

the papers and

hurriedly scanned the headlines. "MOB is IN CONTROL OF CHICAGO" read one. "LAW is TRAMPLED UPON Through the lawless acts of Dictator Debs' strikers the lives of thousands of Chicago citizens were endangered yesterday."

"What do you think about

1

this strike?

'

he asked the news

vendor.

As if it might help him to think, the old man took off his cap and scratched his head. "Well, I dunno. There's some who thinks these strikers are plumb set on burning down the railroads and overthrowing the city and setting up that Debs as President of the United States. Folks like that are scared; they want the goviment to bring in soldiers. Then there's the other side, mostly, I figure, people who works

They say a man's got a right to say: build your Pullman cars and we run *em and we puts our sweat into 'em and we got a right to expect to have a wage that'll feed our famblies." for a living, themselves.

look here,

we

But what do you think?" seller's hands fumbled among the newsand magazines on the counter, in much the same papers way, Darrow saw, as his mind was fumbling for words: "Way I'd like to see it is the goviment would set Mr. Pullman on one side of a table and Mr. Debs on the other and then say to both them men: Now, what is it you want? Both you speak your piece. Then, when both of them had said what they got to say, print it up so everybody could "Yes.

The

read

it.

old news

People could

know for themselves,

then, who's right

and who's wrong. And then the goviment tell both them fellers: 'it don't make no difference, Mr. Pullman, how rich

you are or how much propity you got. And it don't make no difference, Mr. Debs, how many men you got standing behind you. We're going to decide this on what's fair and square."

CLARENCE DARROW

48

"I wish/' Darrow said, "that you were the Federal Attorney in this city." Strange! he thought as he walked hurriedly to the Union offices

that the solution should be so simple and clear and terrible that men should be

yet so difficult to achieve. blinded by greed and fear

How

and prejudice and hatred! the Union offices. Debs was not there; he was with the strikers at the Pullman plant. But the other officials were furious at the injunctions. Up until now the strike had been peaceful. The Union had laid down the law to the men: no damage to property, no action against police or deputy sheriffs or the State Guard. Yesterday that order had been broken and the men had burned a railroad car and thrown a rock at a Pullmanemployed guard who had been taunting them that their jfight was over and they were licked. "Debs is down there now, talking to the men, trying to calm them down and get their promise there won't be any more trouble," Darrow was told. The door was flung open. A man, red-faced from exertion and excitement, eyes bitter with fury, burst into the room. "The troops have been called out! The Federal troops! They've thrown a cordon around the Pullman shops and

He found both fear and hatred in

the railway stations!" Two hours later Clarence was with Governor Altgeld in Springfield.

"You would have to see it to believe it, John. I looked out the window and there they were: Federal troops regu-

Army marching in battle formation down the streets. The lake front is an encampment of them. Think what

lar

and hatred this is stirring in the railway workers! Treated by their own government as enemies. Judged before their case could ever come to a fair settlement of the bitterness

dispute!" "I know." Altgeld's ugly face was tortured. His heavy,

CLARENCE DARROW

49

squat body could usually be forgotten; the dignity of his

made one forget it. But today, as he strode restbetween window and desk and chair, he seemed almost lessly deformed. Only his eyes, glowing with a passionate fire of indignation, were beautiful. "I have wired President Cleveland. The governors of Kansas, Colorado, Texas, and Oregon have also wired, protesting this action. Cleveland is carriage

standing pat: the troops stay/'

"But why?"

"The

official

reason

is

to protect Federal property. "

The

United States mail traveling on the railroads"But the mails have been going through. The Union has been extremely careful to see that no mail train is held up or stopped. Strikers have left picket lines to work so that the mail could go through/' "I know. But that's the official reason. The real reason, Clarence, is that the strikers were winning. They were too

They were beginning to get public support. Pullthe others have done everything to provoke them to violence; hired gunmen as special patrols to 'protect' peaceful.

man and

hoping those gunmen might so would do something rash. Now it will they come. You know I don't agree with some of your socialist ideas, Clarence though I wouldn't call you a socialist. But their property

enrage the

actually

men

The troops have been called out at the of the bidding employers, against the workers." On the steps of the Governor's mansion, as Darrow left, this is class warfare.

the newspapermen crowded around him. "Give us a state-

ment, Mr. Darrow! How come you're representing Eugene Debs? What's Altgeld up to now?" "I'll give you a statement. You can print this. Write it down 'The first shots fired by the regular soldiers at the mobs here will be the signal for a civil war. . . . Bloodshed will follow...!'" The next day, July fifth, railroad tracks were blocked for

CLARENCE DARROW

50 the

first

time.

was burned.

A freight train was stalled and a signal house

On July

sixth, railroad

property was destroyed

to the value of three hundred forty thousand dollars. That same day a Pullman special deputy, a hired gunman, fired into a crowd of workers and killed an innocent spectator. On July seventh four workers were shot and killed and forty more were wounded. All across the country strikers were being arrested in their homes simply because they refused to go back to work when the railroad employers ordered them to. More troops poured into Chicago. And on July tenth, Eugene Debs and three other union officials were arrested and put in jail. Darrow, who had spent a sleepless night trying to arrange getting them out on bail, pending the trial, visited Debs in

his cell the next morning.

"I'm trying," he said. "But they don't mind breaking a few more laws to keep you here, illegally. You're entitled to 111 force them!" bail. Give me a little more time Debs looked at him, sadly. "It doesn't matter any more. I'd like to think that if I were out there, free, I could keep this strike going. But I know better. The strike is broken.

Unarmed men, men who nature

they can't

go on

are peaceful, law-abiding, by against these kinds of odds. The

What happens to one individual me But what will this do to our Union?" important. As Darrow left he thought: There is one of the* few unselfish men I have ever known. And at that same moment, in his cell, Debs was thinking: He doesn't care that he is going to be smeared with the same brush that smears me. There is one of the few unselfish men I have ever known. strike is broken.

isn't

The

was broken. After being charged with conspiracy against the Government of the United States, Debs and the others were released on bail. strike

CLARENCE

D ARROW

51

Now the full weight of the

struggle fell on Darrow. Day he and night worked, month after month, conferring with other lawyers, with union officials but mostly researching the law of conspiracy. This, he found, was a law so vague, so far-reaching, so unfair, that he was astounded it should still be considered a legal process. "Under it," he wrote in his legal brief, "no one's liberty is safe. If a boy should steal a dime a small fine would cover the offense; he could not be sent to the penitentiary. But if two boys by agreement steal a dime then both of them could be sent to the penitentiary as conspirators." "Listen to this," he stormed to Debs as the two men sat long after midnight in the new office Clarence had taken

the Federal attorney is for temporary quarters. "First that the making obstructing the trains from moving charge

because this is public transportation, interstate transportation, and the carrying of United States mail. That's the basis of their case. But how can they move is illegal

against you?

I'll

show you. You believe that your union

over the country should go out on strike to help the Pullman workers. Nothing illegal about that. You can even get up and speak to a mass meeting and say that's what you think. Still nothing illegal. But because you and your other union officials met together in a room and agreed together this should be a good thing, then it becomes a Federal crime. Four men have met and talked and agreed; they have conspired; they are guilty, therefore, of a crime that not one of them, individually, could have been charged with." "What are you planning to do about it?" "I want your permission not to defend you in court. I

members

want

all

and attack this law. I don't want to be given in that courtroom to deny you

to go in there

spend the time I'll were in a certain office didn't say this or that.

time or that you said or have to be your decision."

at a certain

But

it

will

CLARENCE DARROW

52

showed his Mr. Darrow." want, pleasure. On the morning of January 26, 1895, Debs and the other accused union officials filed into the Federal courtroom behind Darrow. They came into the courtroom through a side door; the spectators' benches were already full and there was a cluster of people moving up and down the center

The worn,

tired face of the labor leader

Attack! "That's exactly what

I

searching for a seat they could squeeze into. The defendants there were now eight, since four more union officials had been indicted and Darrow sat at one long table across the front of the room facing a similar table aisle, still

where the best Attorney's office

and brains that the Federal had been able to muster, was already

legal talent

grouped and ready. Debs was tense, but he was also curious. He looked around the room. It was impressive. Dark walnut paneling

on the walls made them rich and somber; a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in a heavy gold frame was the only decoration. The railing that separated the spectators from the participants in the trial was heavily and ornately carved. sat with their backs leaning against it,

The newspapermen

but even they did not slouch as much as usual. The atmosphere made them self-consciously dignified. Debs could feel the eyes of the spectators centering on himself and on Darrow. He could pretty well figure out what they were thinking of him; he could even know that some of them were disappointed. He caught a whisper, "Looks just like a preacher!" from the audience and he understood the astonishment. Where was the fire-eating, wild-haired, bomb-throwing Eugene Debs that the newspapers had described? But he was even more curious about how they were sizing up his lawyer. Did they see the changes that had taken place in this man in the past few months?

How

could they?

They had only known, by

reputation,

CLARENCE DARROW the

53

Darrow who had been the

well-dressed, the carefully barbered, self-assured railway legal counsel. What they saw

a man whose coat was already becoming wrinkled he twisted in his chair, as he leaned forward to speak to each of the defendants in turn. The starched collar was gone. Even his black silk tie was loosened; it constricted him and he jerked at it. When Darrow leaned back in his chair he seemed to crumple a little and his shoulders slumped, but a whisper or a question brought him forward so quickly that it was evident his strength and vitality were coiled inside him, ready for action. His hair was still lank and it still fell over his right eye; he had the unconscious trick of using the heel of his palm to brush it back. But there were touches of gray, now, in his hair. The bailiff rapped and jumped to his feet. The entire courtroom stood up. Judge Grosscup entered and walked

now was

as

to his high desk.

The bailiff intoned the ritual of the words:

the Federal Court of the District

"Oyez, Oyez the trial was opened. The jury of twelve

men

filed in

of"

and

and took their places in

the jury box.

As was customary, the prosecution opened with a speech Judge and jury. The Federal attorney scarcely bothered with the charge for which the defendants were arrested:

to

conspiracy to persuade the railroad workers to remain out on strike. Instead he accused Debs of being guilty for all the lives lost, the property damaged, the riots that had been incited.

Darrow was not

surprised. If the prosecution hoped to their vague charge of conspiracy they would have to prove inflame the minds of the jury. and prejudice

Then

He

it

was his turn.

got up slowly and walked to the center of the room, facing the twelve men who would decide the fate of Debs

CLARENCE DARROW

54

and the

grow

others.

taller

His shoulders straightened.

and bigger, become massive, and

He seemed

to

his voice flung

words out like powerful blows: "This is a historic case which will count much for liberty or against liberty. Conspiracy, from the days of tyranny in has been the favorite weapon of every tyrant. England It is an effort to punish the crime of thoughtl" He stopped. He wanted those words to sink in. He felt, rather than saw, the surprise that rippled around the prosecution's table and the sudden, disturbed motion as Judge Grosscup bent forward to listen. This was not the usual way a defense lawyer made an opening argument. It was usual "I will prove to you that my client is not guilty to begin because my client did not say the things he is accused of; my client was not in the places he was supposed to be in" .

.

.

something to that

effect.

Darrow went on: "These defendants published to all the world what they were doing and in the midst of a widespread strike were never so busy but that they found time to counsel against violence. For this they are brought into court by an organization which uses the government as a cloak to conceal its infamous purposes." As the trial went on, for a whole month, it was plain that there were two trials: the prosecution attempting to convict Debs of conspiracy; Darrow attempting to convict the railroad employers, through the General Managers' Association, of using the government to break a strike and now using a shameful trick of "conspiracy" to frame Debs into prison.

"Darrow may be the lawyer for the defense/* one newspaperman whispered to another, "but it's the prosecution that is on the defensive." That was the day it was revealed that George Pullman had run away. Darrow had subpoenaed him. He wanted to put Pullman on the stand and force him to admit the truth

CLARENCE DARROW about the wage

55

poverty and misery of his workers. But Pullman could not be found and the Federal attorney was squirming in embarrassment. cuts, the rent gouges, the

Even without Pullman, by putting Pullman workers on the witness stand, Darrow was able to expose the conditions that began the strike. By putting labor leaders

on the witness stand he was able show the history of why the conspiracy law had always been used to destroy unions. In 1895, trade unions were still small; they were still being periodically born and

to

periodically smashed. "It is not just this strike the General

Managers broke;

it

not these few defendants they hope to put away in jail; it is the American Railway Union that the General Managers are hoping to destroy here and now, in this courtis

room!" Darrow stormed.

And

the employers could form a General Managers' Association and meet to discuss ways and means of destroyif

why was not that a conspiracy? Why was the law conspiracy applied only to unions? As the trial went on Darrow seemed to grow in vigor. The courtroom battle stimulated him. His tiredness dropped away. There was no question in his mind or in the opinion of the newspaper reporters that he was winning the jury to his side. He was heading for victory. Then, suddenly, one day, the scene in the courtroom changed. Even after Judge Grosscup entered there was still no one in the jury box and the Judge announced that, since one juror had fallen ill, he was declaring a mistrial. whole month gone for nothing! Darrow was furious. True, Debs and the other defendants were never again brought to trial on the conspiracy charge; this was dropped. But the prize of victory had slid out of their hands. Though this was the worst, there was still another blow: Debs was ing the

A

strike,

56

CLARENCE DARROW

on another charge for not obeying the first Federal injunction. The trial on this was quick. Debs was sentenced to six months in jail. There had been no jury and Judge Woods was not the man to let Darrow do much arguing about it; sentence was pronounced so speedily there was no question it had all been decided on in advance. This was a bitter, a terrible, blow to Clarence Darrow. arrested again

CHAPTER

m m

4

He

was thirty-eight years old. He was "that notorious Clarence Darrow" who defended trade unionists and radicals. He had tossed away a fine legal practice because of a principle; had risked everything and lost. It seemed to him a great act of kindness that he was asked to join the newly organized firm of Collins, Goodrich and Vincent. What could he be to these young, eager lawyers just starting a new office but a liability? To his great surprise he found that he was a considerable asset to the firm. He was the money-maker. He brought in most of the clients. Not only the poor of the city came to him, but so did many of the rich. His defense of Debs had brought him to the attention of everyone in Chicago, and somehow word had been spread that only a juror's illness had prevented him from winning for Debs. He was in great demand as a speaker and lecturer. At the Sunset Club he could speak on Thomas Carlyle or read from the poet Burns, but when he spoke at large gatherings he spoke of law and crime and punishment. "It will be admitted/' he would say, "that no man is responsible for his birth nor his early environment. No one is responsible for the sort of instruction that he receives in his childhood." The child, he told his audiences, had to be

CLARENCE DARROW

58

know what was

right and what was wrong. Yet a what good was it teaching man that it was wrong to steal food, if society did not also provide him with the means of earning that food? And if a child, growing up, saw only

trained to

cruelty

and mistreatment around him, how could he be

expected to treat others with fairness? How many criminals could really be held entirely responsible for their crimes? Darrow found himself immensely popular, sought-out, welcomed and flattered and liked not by those who called him "notorious" but by labor leaders and social workers

and

artists,

writers, musicians, educators,

by

liberal

and

radical thinkers. It

was an exciting period for him, but

the saddest of his

it

was, in

one way,

life.

He and

Jessie had drifted apart. They had loved each other deeply and still respected and admired each other. But they were too different in personality and tastes and

temperament to stay married to each other. Jessie had stood by him in all his troubles. She was a good mother to Paul. But she disliked that part of Clarence's life which to him was the very essence of his being: the questioning, debating, arguing part of his life. She stopped going with him to the Sunset Club and he found he would rather go alone. It seemed to Jessie that these people were always shouting at each other, each one violently defending his own idea. The next minute the whole argument would break up over a joke. She couldn't understand people like

this:

noisy, excited, turbulent, quarrelsome people. Hers was a quiet nature. "You know what I'm like Everett," Clarence confessed to his older brother. He was wretched, knowing that the

was his and yet not knowing how it could be changed. "I have to have people, lots of people, around me. I like excitement. I like to provoke arguments. I sharpen my wits fault

by arguing."

CLARENCE DARROW

And

"Jessie understands.

59

so does Paul," Everett

com-

forted him.

They were

divorced. It was

due

to Jessie's sweetness

and

kindness that they parted as good friends and were to remain that for the rest of their lives. Paul lived with his

mother but Clarence saw him as frequently as the boy's school life and Clarence's workdays permitted. Jessie was an unusual woman in this; she wanted Paul to have the benefit of his father's love and guidance, even though his parents were separated. During this breakup of his marriage Clarence worked harder than ever. At night he studied. He was reading much, dipping into anthropology, economics, geology, keeping up with the

latest

novels,

the latest political

theories.

Everyone was after or that social group.

him

would join nothing. just as he hoped to keep enemies for him.

It

to join this society or this party

He made a decision, then, that he He would keep his associations free, his ideas free.

caused some to

This attitude made

call

him

wishy-washy;

popped in and out of his head and philosophy and his politics as often as

others to claim that ideas that he changed his he changed his shirt.

One day

a friend of

his,

Hamlin Garland, the

writer,

dropped into the apartment just after dinner. "Well, Darrow, what's your latest slant?" Clarence peered at

him

suspiciously, surprised. "That's

what you always ask me. Why?" "Well," Garland replied, "that's why I come here, to get few who your latest slant on things. You're one of the I'm and the with mind his times, always sure of changes

new angle how you've come to completely about one thing or another according to mind change your affairs. You're the only man I know who the turn of world hearing some

CLARENCE DARROW

60

hasn't the least pride "

or shame

about admitting that he's

been wrong

1

"There's no such thing as standing still/ nodded Darrow. "Unless a fellow moves ahead, he's left behind." Garland might approve but many did not. Darrow would

an hour later in speak on a platform defending socialism; conversation with socialists he would be blistering them for their narrow-minded, rigid, unrealistic attitudes. He felt that the anarchists were right in saying that governments

had grown to be so powerful that they ruled men and that they were, in turn, controlled by wealth and property. But he scoffed at their notion that we should do away with all governments and that men could manage their affairs by some kind of free and equal associations. He was not religious and he said so, openly; yet he claimed that atheists were as fanatically sure of themselves as the worst religious fanatic.

"Everybody's for something/' he would drawl. "I'm just against conformity, against believing against." And he was in something just because the majority believed it, against prejudice and narrow-mindedness and being set-in-his-ways. Suddenly, there was no time left for arguments or for speaking at lectures or for gay parties. Life once more revolved,

and the

spotlight turned

on Clarence Darrow and

brought him once again out into public affairs.

The woodworkers

had gone on strike. In company owned by a man named George M. Paine. The company employed sixteen hundred workers who were paid, on the average, ninety-six cents for a ten-hour-day of work. Because he of Wisconsin

the town of Oshkosh was a lumber

could pay children even less, Paine broke the child-labor law to hire boys and girls from the age of ten years and upand paid them sixty-five cents a day. Women he could hire for eighty cents. It

was against

this

man and

this

company, principally,

CLARENCE DARROW

61

Amalgamated Woodworkers' International Union striking. Once again the Union leaders were jailed for conspiracy; once again Clarence Darrow was asked to take that the

was

their defense.

For weeks he put one worker after another on the stand to tell his story. The sixteen hundred workers lived in tumble-down shacks that were freezing cold in winter and without any sanitary facilities. They were locked inside Paine's factory all day; no one could leave without permission; they could not speak to each other while they were working. Union organizers were beaten in front of the plant gates. The opposing lawyer argued that the factory was Paine's property; he could lock it all day if he chose. It was Paine's money and he could pay his workers ninety-six cents a day or nine cents a day, if he wished. Paine had a right to do what he could to keep the Union from organizing his shop. Besides the prosecution angrily stated Paine was not on trial;

these labor leaders were, for conspiring to strike. it was Clarence Barrow's turn to make his final

When

plea to the jury, he rose from his seat at the defense table and walked deliberately, slowly, toward the twelve men who

were

sitting in

judgment on his clients. He studied their and he wondered: Had they been shocked

faces, carefully, at all by the revelations of

how George

Paine treated his

workers?

In an easy, almost conversational, way Clarence once again took his listeners in that courtroom back over the testimony that had been given. He painted a picture of the life of a woodworker: how he worked and how he lived.

The newspapermen were bored. The biggest newspapers in the country had sent reporters here because they were sure that if Clarence Darrow was the lawyer in a case, then there would be drama and emotion and excitement. But Darrow was scarcely living up to that reputation. Then, abruptly, his voice changed. Even his body straight-

CLARENCE DARROW

62

ened; his shoulders seemed to broaden; he moved up and down in front of the jury, pounding his words home his

hand was a

pounding into his right, accompanying he said, "is a liar. He does not Paine," "George believe these labor leaders, my clients, are guilty of conspiring against the laws of this land. George Paine believes them

left

fist,

his words.

he believes himself a guilty of conspiring against him. And life and starvation, and of life the with death, right god, over his workers.

"These employers/' he hammered away and he meant Paine and his associates "these employers are using this court of justice because in their misguided cupidity they believe that they may be able to destroy what little is left of that spirit of independence and manhood which they have been slowly crushing from the breast of those who toil for them/' He paused for breath. "Remember Paine is not supporting these people; these men, women and children are supporting him." The jury stirred in their seats. This was a new concept to them. Darrow, watching them, knew he had scored a bull'seye. They were realizing that Paine's pay checks to his workers were not an act of benevolence on his part; his profits, his millions, came from their work.

Then Darrow

cried out, following up his advantage: "I that in a free country, in a country where George Paine does not rule supreme, every person has the right

take

M.

it

to lay

down the

tools of his trade if

he

shall choose.

Not only

that, but in a free country where liberty of speech is guaranteed, every man has the right to go to his fellow man and are in a great battle for libsay, 'We are out on strike.

We We are war for our fellow man. For God's sake, erty. waging

come with us and help.' " Darrow was speaking of a principle with him: that

if

the employers could

that was fundamental

band together to keep

CLARENCE DARROW

63

wages down, labor had the right to organize and strike for their demands. He finished his speech to the jury by making the kind of emotional appeal that the newspapermen had expected of him. "I appeal to you for the long line the long, long line reaching back through the ages and forward to the years the long line of despoiled and downtrodden to come I appeal to you for those men who rise before morning daylight comes and who go home at night when the light has faded from the sky and give their life, their strength, their toil to make others rich and great.

people of the earth.

in the

your lot to be leading actors in one of the of human life Providence has placed in great dramas your charge for today . . the helpless toilers, the hopeless men, the despondent women and suffering children of this ... It has fallen to

.

world

1

know you

humanely and well

will "

do your duty

bravely, wisely,

The jury voted: Not Guilty. With this victory a great wave of rejoicing spread through every labor organization in the country. Working men and women looked to Clarence Darrow as one of their chief

He was their lawyer. The law firm of which Darrow was a partner thought otherwise. The Woodworkers' Union victory brought with supporters.

it attacks on the firm from newspapers; some of their clients withdrew. The name of Clarence Darrow had become an embarrassment to them, as the firm had prospered; it was inevitable and best for all that he should release them from this embarrassment. Darrow broke off relationships with

them and started his own firm, taking in two young men, William O. Thompson and Morris St. Thomas, as junior partners.

very well. They were never retained by a large company; they were not legal counsel for railroads or banks, but they made money. When ordinary people were in seri-

They did

CLARENCE DARROW

64

ous trouble, the name of Darrow drew them like a magnet. He was busy. He had won a tremendous victory and even gained some fame outside of his own city. He had friends and a full life but he was dissatisfied. For a while young Paul had filled that gap in his personal life and brought him the comfort of having some one person close to him. His son was grown enough to share interests with him, and the two became good companions. Paul went with him on business

and lecture

trips.

They went to baseball games together,

and the father spent his vacations in the Wisconsin woods, hiking and tramping and fishing with his son. They grew close together during these times, though they were not temperament nor in the bent of their minds. Now that he was a bachelor, Clarence took full advantage of it. He worked hard during the day; at night he played just as hard. He moved into the Langdon Apartments where he had a three-room flat. In the apartment next to him was Francis S, Wilson, a young cousin of Jessie's. Darrow and Wilson found each other such good companions that they knocked out the wall between their two apartments and made one large one out of it large enough for the parties

alike in

they gave constantly. The rooms were furnished in gaudy yellows and reds and blues; there were never enough chairs for all their guests to sit on,

but there were big, stuffed cushions and

to pull these

up

in a circle

Apartments became known

and

to it

came every and

around the

fire.

it

was fun

The Langdon

"Cooperative Living Club" sorts of visitors. On a typical

as a

all

one corner of the living room, a trade unionist would be earnestly discussing labor legislation with the foremost theatrical star of the city; an artist would be sketching the head of a visiting professor of social studies from England; a group of people would be having a heated argument over the newest fashions for women. Then, gradually, all would gather in front of the hearth to listen to night, in

CLARENCE DARROW

65

Darrow read aloud from Voltaire. By the end of the evening he would be singing at top of his voice, with all coming in on the last line of the chorus:

"The bear went over the mountain

To see what he could see, He came back over the mountain, 'Twas

all

that

he could

see-ee-ee-ee!"

Finally all his friends got so tired of this particular song that it was only by special permission, on his birthday perhaps, that he was allowed to inflict it on them. Paul enjoyed coming to the Langdon Apartments

and

He was quiet and would rather meeting listen than talk. Because he was young, because he was Clarence's son and a bright boy, he might easily have been spoiled by all the attention of his father's friends, but he was level-headed and more likely to be amused by them than to take them too seriously. When Paul was sixteen he wanted to quit school and find a job. This disturbed Barrow; he talked Paul into going to his father's friends.

Dartmouth in New Hampshire. Clarence was alone, really alone, once more. Shortly after his son's departure a lecture was announced to be held at the White City Club, on the subject of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. Feeling slightly melancholic and depressed, Clarence said "no" when friends urged him to come; at the last moment he changed his mind. Anything was better than sitting around and wishing that Paul were not so far away. Omar Khayyam was a favorite of Clarence's and for a

college, to

Now

half

hour he

listened intently:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring Your Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The

To

Bird of

fly

Time has but a

and Lol the Bird

is

little

way on the Wing.

CLARENCE DARROW

66

This did not help to raise his spirits. He didn't need to be reminded that time was moving on for him. And where was the "Fire of Spring" for him? His attention wandered. He looked, casually, without much interest over the audience. His eye was caught by a redheaded girl sitting two rows in front of him and slightly to his left; every once in a while she turned her face and he could see she was very pretty. It wasn't so much hex looks that attracted him as it was the way the color came and went in her cheeks, the way she listened so intently tc the poetry, and in the way she applauded so enthusiastically at the end of the reading. After the meeting he pushed his way, slowly, to her side, He felt strangely cautious; h? wanted to observe her without being noticed by her. Sh? was talking in a quick, light laughing voice and her hands made graceful punctuation marks to her words. Luckily, Clarence knew the "man who accompanied her, who was later to found a whole neiv It was John H. Gregg of shorthand notes. Clarence nudged him, system taking "Introduce me," he whispered. "Miss Ruby Hamerstrom, may I present Clarence Barrow?" Gregg made it extremely formal. Then he turned tc Clarence: "Ruby is a writer for newspapers and magazines, You two should know each other. (Clarence "is a famous

man

"

he explained to the girl, "but he likes to take heads people's apart and see what goes on inside of them, I think a redheaded girl like you, with a quick tongue and a quick temper is just what he needs to make him mind his manners." "Pay no attention to him." Clarence fitted his hand undei her elbow and moved her away, expertly, out of the crowd "My friends always have the privilege of insulting me, Look before he gets through the crowd and finds uswill you have dinner with me tomorrow evening?"

CLARENCE DARROW

'Tm sorry. I "Why not?" The

67

can't."

sparks in her eyes were becoming indignant ones. I can't. Must I give reasons?"

"Because

"Oh, yes. A lawyer always argues every point, you know." "Very well, then. The reason is that my fiance wouldn't like it. I am engaged to a man who lives in New York; I'm here with Mr. Gregg because he is an old friend of mine." The next evening, having found out very easily where she was living, he presented himself at her door to take her out for dinner. She refused. He came the next night. She was furious.

"What shall I do?" she asked her landlady that night, after Darrow had received her second, refusal without the least sign of either

giving

up

embarrassment or of any intention of

his campaign, "He says he will be here again York. my fiance .is coming tomorrow from

tomorrow I've been rude;

New

nothing seems to make the least bit of difference to Clarence Darrow." "Don't you go out with him," her landlady warned. "Not that he isn't a fine man and a fine attorney. But he has a reputation for liking pretty ladies and taking them out and I've

been angry

being so gallant to them and then, when they get serious, they find he is not. He just isn't interested in marriage. You stay with that boy you're engaged to. A New York stockbroker, now; he sounds steady and dependable and the kind that, won't give you trouble." When her fiancQ arrived the next day, Ruby talked over the little problem with him. "He's so persistent," she explained. "Do you think it would hurt if I had dinner with him, just this one time? Then Mr. Darrow will feel he has

won to

his victory or

whatever challenge

him and then he will leave me

I

seem to represent

alone."

"I can't see any harm in going to dinner with once," her fiance replied.

him

just

CLARENCE DARROW

68

Experienced lawyers who had found themselves in courtroom opposition to Clarence Darrow had long ago learned it was never safe to give him the

That was

his fatal mistake.

opening wedge. the evening carefully. She insisted that Mrs. Gregg must accompany Clarence and herself; after dinner she would not go home to her own boardinghouse but stay all night with Mrs. Gregg. In that way there would be no chance for Clarence Darrow to walk her home or drive her home or have any moment alone with her. But somehow it didn't work out that way. After dinner Clarence was to speak at a meeting; he made it sound so exciting that she weakened and agreed to go with him even though Mrs. Gregg could not And after that they walked slightest

Ruby planned

through the dark, quiet Chicago streets, letting the wind and the rain blow them along and finding that they both shared this adventurous love of fighting storms just as they had already found they shared interests of the mind and of the emotions. As they were crossing the Rush Street Bridge, Clarence suddenly stopped and took her hands, holding them so that she had to face him very close. He had to shout, over the wind, to make her hear. "I've never known anyone I liked so much right from the start!" he yelled at her. "That's why I think I ought to tell you. I've been married, I never never intend to

marry again."

How conceited of him! She was insulted. "That's fine!" she shouted back. "Because I'm leaving in two weeks to be married myself." "You're not!" The wind tore most of his words away but " she heard some of it. break your engagement! we " shouldn't be separated people who like each other

Whether or not Clarence had meant his statement about never marrying again as a challenge or whether or not he really meant it, is not important. It had its effect Ruby was

CLARENCE DARROW

69

independent as he was; she could a not pass up dare. Besides, as she admitted to him later, she had fallen in love with him that first night at the lecture as bold, as adventurous, as

on Omar Khayyam. She told him

wedding. Not before. Oh, no, Ruby made him work hard before she would agree to many this after the

him (though she had

New

York stockbroker back her most When he wanted to express something very deep and true to himself, he used old-fashioned, homely words. And the word that described her to him was "spunky." She had spunk and grit, this very feminine, very pretty redhead who was his match for honesty, and frequently his sharpest opponent in an sent the

his ring almost immediately). And Clarence loved for this pride and the value she placed on herself.

argument. She liked people and the stimulation of

much

new

ideas as

Ruby had run away from her home in because her family had thought she Illinois, Galesburg, should not be scribbling and writing when she could be cooking and sewing for the family. By the time Clarence had met her she had made a reputation for herself on newspapers and magazines and was doing a column in the Chicago Evening Post called "Woman and her Ways/' Their courtship was a time of great happiness for Clarence, in spite of the fact that at times it was stormy and that it lasted much longer than he had expected it to. They as

he

did.

weren't married until July of 1903. In the meantime, in the midst of his

own

happiness,

Darrow took note John

of another's tragedy. Peter Altgeld's political career

had been brought to

a shocking and abrupt end. He had stood out against popular opinion and, as Governor, had pardoned four of the Haymarket anarchists because he felt they had been unjustly imprisoned. His act had been a courageous one but it had cost him his fame, his livelihood and his career. Now, in

CLARENCE DARROW

70

1900, Altgeld was an old man, broken in health, poor and destitute and despised, Darrow offered him a place in his law firm; his affection and gratitude to Altgeld had never

wavered.

man was

end his days proudly, as a useful practitioner of the law and able once more to hold up his head and pay his own way. It was 1900. The beginning of a new century. The whole of America went wild with celebration. In the hearts of all people there was hope and prayer that the new century would mean the dawn of peace and brotherhood It

meant that the

and plenty. Darrow was

fine old

to

seemed to him that as long as there were great inequalities between wealth and poverty, as long as there was ignorance and mental ill-health, there would still be the same old troubles. But he was willing to hope. In 1902 John Mitchell of the United Mine Workers brought him a case that meant more than just hope; it proved there could be a peaceful solution to labor problems. President Theodore Roosevelt had set up a special arbitration committee to hear the complaints of both miners and mine owners over conditions in the Pennsylvania coal areas. This was highly unusuaL It placed the union on an equality, as bargaining agent for the men, with the comcynical. It

panies.

was so important and because it might point more such arbitrations instead of warfare and way strikes Darrow threw himself into this case. He went to the coal mines; he climbed down the shafts to see what it was like; he visited homes and talked to the families of Because

the

it

to

miners.

They were

asking for higher wages and an eight-hour day for some of their workers, and for recognition of the United

Mine Workers addition, the

as their legal

bargaining representative. In to have the right to buy

mine workers wanted

CLARENCE DARROW

71

their groceries where they pleased, instead of at the company store where the prices were too high and where they stayed in constant debt to the company.

The miners had been

out on

strike,

previous to this

arbitration hearing. It was the Union that had begged Roosevelt to try this new method of settling the dispute.

When,

finally,

the hearing was called and

into the Federal Building

room

Darrow walked

set aside for the

purpose,

he was surprised. It was not a courtroom. He felt not quite at ease; there was no judge sitting on high, no jury. But when he realized that there were not two tables one for the mine owners and one for the workers but that they all sat around one and that the arbitrator sat with them, he felt hopeful for the shape of the future. This was the way it should be. The one familiar thing was the witness chair. The mine owners put on their witnesses first, to try to prove that the strike meant a danger to their property; that the strike was a threat to the stability of the country; and that even if the complaints of the workers were true, the

companies had the right to pay what they pleased and do what they pleased. Then Clarence put on his witnesses. He called, first, a thin, pale, tired worker a man who looked sixty though he was some twenty years younger than that.

"Your name?"

"My name is Coll Henry Coll." Darrow took him through preliminary testimony to prove that Henry Coll had been one of the leaders of the strike at

one particular coal mine, the Markle Company mine. "Now, Mr. Coll, will you tell these gentlemen your story

in your

own words?" we were asleep,

"Well

the wife and

when there was a knock on the door. up late, that I didn't hear the first

I

me and my

was so

one.

tired; I'd

The

kids

been

wife goes to

CLARENCE DARROW

72

the door. She's been terribly sick and she hated to get up because it was so cold and she was coughing so bad, but she went and opened the door. There was a couple of men there. I

woke up

just then

and

heard them

I

"You're Mrs.

say:

We're deputies. We now!" Darrow pressed home the point. "You mean they wanted to evict you out of your house in the middle of a cold, win-

got orders to get you people outa

Coll?

here, right

ter night?"

didn't just 'mean to. wife outa the way and came in,

1

They pushed my waking the kids. I got up and argued with them. My wife was crying. She was saying, "Henry tell them we can't leave. Ask them why they are "They

doing

this to us?'

did.

"

"Did they explain?" "No. They just grabbed a yours?'

They

When my wife

little

said yes they

Same with everything, stove,

table

and

threw

it

chairs, the beds

my kids were sleeping on. Made them get up. cold

and those little kids in

'This

out the door. even the beds

It

their nightclothes

said:

was freezing " he choked

and could hardly go on. Darrow waited a moment. Then he asked: "And what else happened? Please go on, Mr. Coll?" "Well, the men said 'What else belongs to you? Don't you take anything belongs to the Markle Company! That stays. But you people and your furniture goes for a long, long ride.' I was so mad I was trying to fight with them. We didn't have much furniture; it wasn't that. We'd had to sell most of what we had for food, those past weeks. But my wife was sick and she had to dress herself and the kids and go out I could see through the door there was a big rain storm just pouring down outside. But they was bigger than me and there was nothing I could do we all had to go.

They

stripped the house

I'd paid rent for fifteen years to

CLARENCE DARROW

73

Markle for that house they loaded the stuff onto a wagon and then made us get into it, too. Then they drove off."

"Where did they take you? To someplace warm and dry and where your sick wife could get treatment?" The miner looked his disgust at Darrow. "They took us a good piece out onto the highway. Miles away from nowhere. Then they said: 'All right, you Colls. Get down/ And they made us get out into that rain and wind and cold and they threw our furniture out after us. Then they drove off."

"With no explanation as to why they were doing all

this?"

"I didn't need to be told why.

They was special deputies paid by Markle, not by the city. They I found out afterwardsthey did the same thing to a few other guys who had been leading the strike. They were going to teach us a lesson we'd better not join any Union or lead any strike." Darrow took a long moment to let the words Henry Coll had said sink in to his listeners' minds and hearts. He was angry himself, but it showed only in the strain of keeping his questions calm and mild. He turned to the government arbitrator. "I wanted Mrs. Coll to tell you her story. To affirm what her husband has just said. But Mrs. Coll cannot be present." Now he spoke again to the witness. "Why is Mrs. Coll not here?" "Because she's deadl" the miner blurted out "Because she died of exposure from that nightl" Around

the

room

several people cleared their throats.

A

woman reporter was unashamedly crying.

When aU the testimony had been taken Darrow addressed the arbitrator and his committee. He talked for seven hours, without notes, with hardly a pause for a than the emotional appeal and now he

recess.

Even more

felt free to let

the

anger come out in his voice and one fist pounded into the other as he spoke again of Mrs. Coll what impressed both

CLARENCE DARROW

74

the committee and the

newspapermen was

that

studied the opposition's case as closely as his

Darrow had

own.

He proved that the bookkeepers' reports of the mine companies were

false.

The companies were

not too poor to pay

rich and getting richer every day. the President's committee was a victory of findings for the Union: all contract miners were given a ten per

a

raise.

They were

The

cent raise. Engineers and

pumpmen gained an eight-hour were The miners day. permitted to have their own men act as weighers and dockers. The United Mine Workers Union was granted the right to act as bargaining agent for all the men. As Darrow and John Mitchell, the Union president, were walking down the corridor of the Federal Building, making their way through a crowd of happy, congratulating people, being stopped every two feet by a newspaperman wanting a statement or a photographer begging for another flashbulb picture, Darrow suddenly noticed a big in front of them.

man

walking just

"Who is that?" he asked Mitchell. "Do you know him? He was sitting in the audience every single day. He isn't a isn't a mine owner, but I noticed that everytheir side was very respectful to him. They were constantly going up to him and whispering in his ear and

lawyer and he

one on

listening to advice."

him

looked as though he was giving them

Mitchell looked intently at the

man ahead

of them.

He

became purple with emotion. "Know him! I should say I do know him. I hope you never do. That is James McParland one of the most dangerous men I know. He works for the Pinkertons; hires out spies and thugs and hoodlums to break strikes and get his men into union leadership where they try to provoke trouble and, underhand, send reports to the company owners o whistled, sharply. His face

CLARENCE DARROW

75

we do. Yes, I know him. I sure hope you never have any dealings with him, Mr. Darrow." Clarence felt, for a moment, as though something was warning him, something sinister had touched him with its shadow of danger to come. But for the moment all was well. A few months later, in July of 1903, Ruby and Clarence were married. Ruby was proud of her husband and proud that his name was known, now, in the highest circles of Washington and headlined in newspapers all over the country. She also knew he was a tired man and deserved a vacation. They went for a leieverything

surely, pleasant trip of several

months, to Europe.

CHAPTER

1

D

K J)

In his Chicago apartment, on the night of February 17, 1906, Clarence Darrow sat at his desk, reading. The European trip had done him a lot of good; he was rested, fit, at peace with the world. And the world had given him peace, too. There had been nothing lately but the ordinary cases of an ordinary law practice. He felt happy and relaxed. But that very same night, in Denver, Colorado, another man was also sitting at his desk a big, hard-muscled man, with a shock of black, curly hair and a hearty, vigorous, strong face. His room was a cheap lodginghouse room, clean, but scantily furnished. There was only the bed, the table, the desk, and the chair he was sitting on. Wooden pegs in the wall held his coat, his hat, a couple of shirts. That was all.

The black-haired man was writing a letter. Writing did not come easily to him; he was a man of action, of quick speech, but writing was difficult. The labor of it seemed to irk him; the way he held his shoulders so uncomfortably stiff and the way he squirmed in his chair There was a knock on the door. He got up, grateful for the interruption. But he was a man who lived with danger.

He

was cautious. "Who's there?" he

called.

76

CLARENCE DARROW

77

A voice said,

"I want to see you, Bill." must be a friend, calling him by his first name like that. Reassured, he opened the door then quickly tried to slam it shut. But the deputy sheriff had his foot inside and his was out. gun "What do you want?" Trouble was nothing new to "Big Bill" Haywood, but he had recognized this sheriff as one he knew from Idaho. What was a lawman from Idaho doing here in Colorado, pointing a gun at him? "I want you to come with me/' The words were to the point; the gun was doing the speaking. There was no arguing with that gun, but Haywood tried. "Why should I? You've got no rights here. No jurisdiction in this state. What do you want me for? What is it now?" The man's face was expressionless. He had been told not to talk; no more than was necessary, "I can't tell you anyIt

You just come along." The black-haired man walked

thing.

silently

down

the board-

inghouse steps in front of the deputy. His mind was racing. If only someone would come along and see this if only a

member of the Western Federation of Miners would show up! This was kidnapping. The deputy had shown no papers, no warrant from either Idaho or Colorado. If this was legal there would have been a Colorado sheriff, not this one. But even if Colorado wasn't officially ordering his arrest, it seemed to him that someone must have connived at it: the deputy took him to the Denver county jail. In the cell next to him was Charles H. Moyer, the president of the Western Federation. This was an even greater jolt and a bigger puzzle to Haywood. Why? Why was he here? Why was Moyer here? friend of his or a

The deputy laughed

at their questions.

going a warrant won't matter. without any piece of paper/'

"Where you're

They can hang you both

CLARENCE DARROW

78

next morning both men were carefully manacled, into a waiting carriage. carefully smuggled out of jail and They were driven to a train. The train was nothing but an engine and one railroad car. It was a train that held nothing

The

but these prisoners and their guards. "We should feel honored," Moyer

said,

with irony, to

Haywood.

more honored if we had help if someone what was happening to us." Haywood growled. knew only He took one look out of the train window before they pulled "I'd feel a lot

out; there was nothing in sight, not a soul, except for a bakery cart and the driver delivering hot rolls and cakes to the train restaurant.

But the bakery driver had an uncle who was a miner.

He

was, himself, sympathetic to the Western Federation of Miners. Turning his horse's head, he let the carriage move slowly away from the station, then once out of sight he raced up the street to the Federation headquarters.

And

so Clarence Darrow,

wakening that morning in his a found Chicago apartment, telegram pushed under his The first door. link between Haywood and Darrow had been forged; the telegram was the start of one of Clarence Darrow's most famous cases.

The

telegram read: "Please come at once. You are badly needed. Western Federation of Miners' officials kidnapped out of state to Idaho. believe this to be an attempt to involve Haywood and the union in the murder trial, in the death of ex-Governor Frank Steunenberg."

We

Murder!

The

telegram was signed by Edmund Richardson, the attorney for the Western Federation. Darrow wanted to

He would have liked to have sent a blunt "no" to this man Richardson. He hated murder cases. How could a lawyer always be sure his client was innocent? And didn't refuse.

the guilty, even, deserve an attorney for their defense? But

CLARENCE DARROW

when a lawyer knew his

79

was he to compromise with truth, decide that his loyalty was to his client, plead him innocent, and try with every trick he could to free the slayer? These were questions that haunted all lawyers; no one had yet found die satisfactory answer, least of all, Darrow. He fervently hoped that Haywood was innocent. He would have to take the case. He knew something of the long and tortured history of the struggles of that particular union and Darrow's sympathies were with the unionizers. Darrow went to Denver. Richardson met him and drove him to the Federation headquarters for a conference. Crowded around Darrow's chair were half a dozen miners, sitting

on

stools,

client

was

guilty,

leaning against the wall or squatting

on

They were such big men and so restless in their pent-up anger that Darrow felt as though they were physically crowding him, pushing him into action. They wanted action. First, though, he wanted facts. "All right. Now tell me what has happened. Who was Steunenberg? Why have they got your union officials mixed up in his murder?" Richardson answered. "We wish we knew knew the real facts, I mean. Steunenberg was once Governor of Idaho* Perhaps you know that. He was murdered, in Caldwell, Idaho. Nobody thought much about it here. They arrested the floor.

a man

named Orchard. He confessed to setting off the bomb

that exploded at Steunenberg's gate

and

killed Steunen-

that to do with Haywood and Moyer?" 'Tin coming to that. It isn't just those two, now. They've arrested George Pettibone, too. He used to be a Federation official. He retired a little while ago and has a small business

"But what has

in Boise. "I

still

They picked him don't

"There's

up, too/'

see"

there

was

hard feeling between Steunen-

CLARENCE DARROW

80

He broke a berg and the Western Federation, for years. strike of ours. We think this is a frame-up. Steunenberg dies; someone remembers he was an enemy of ours; they decide to pin this bone."

"But

if this

murder on Haywood, Moyer and

man Orchard has

confessed

Petti-

"

Before Richardson could speak one of the miners interrupted. "We don't know what's going on up in Idaho, Mr.

you knew something of how much the speaker was a short man, wide and thick; they hate us he looked shorter than he was because his shoulders were so stooped with hard labor. His hands were knotted and gnarled and the muscles stood out on them like thick ropes. "It's like this. The Federation's been fighting for nearly fifteen years to get all the miners organized, and the mine Darrow. But maybe

if

"

owners have been fighting all out to break us up. It ain't been a pretty fight. It's been dirty and mean and rough and they've brought in their gunmen and we've fought back with our fists and clubs and anything else we got. Now they think they can break us by jailing our leaders. It's worked before, so they think they'll try

it

again."

"Doesn't sound," Darrow said, "as though the law means

much in these Western states." The miner spat. His face had tried the law.

We

a wry good humor.

thought we'd play

nice.

We

"We

spent a lot

of time writing leaflets and talking to people and we finally got them to vote for an eight-hour-day law here in Colorado, 'stead of a twelve-hour one. Do you know what it's like to work in a mine twelve straight hours? Hot as a furnace

down

there.

Bad

air.

Work with

your back bent hour

after

hour. Every few months a cave-in. Somebody gets killed. So what good did our nice legal eight-hour law do us? No good at

The mine

owners, they just speak quiet to a few Court Supreme judges, and next thing you know our law is declared unconstitutional. You hear that? It's constituall.

CLARENCE tional to

work twelve hours;

DARROW it's

81

unconstitutional to

work

"

only eight "All right," Richardson broke in, "Mr. Darrow doesn't want us to take up his time for that right now. Later. Not

now.

What he wants is a quick run-down of facts.

A few years ago the Western Federation went

background.

on

Here's the

The mine owners

did everything they could: in scab called out the Militia, jailed Federalabor, brought On leaders. tion June 4, 1904, a railroad depot at Independstrike.

ence was blown up. For that, eight hundred men men to be secret members of our Federation were taken at the point of bayonet from their homes and

who were known

and hauled way out into the middle and unloaded there. Like so much to die. So you can see there has been plenty of and desire for revenge, on both sides. The Fed-

packed into

cattle cars

of the prairie, in Kansas, cattle left

bitterness

eration has gone

"And you

on organizing/' Haywood and

think

the other two have been

on a phony charge of murder, to try to smash the Federation?" Darrow asked. "We certainly do. Kidnapping him out of this state And no real charges, even yet, made against any of them!" Darrow sat for a minute. His chair was a swivel chair and he moved around in it, uneasily. Then he raised his head and looked straight at the miner who had spoken before. "One thing I want to know. Has the Federation are any of the charges of dynamiting and bloodshed against the

arrested

I

miners

The

are they true?" short, heavy-set man looked back defiantly. "Sure Dynamiting? I don't know about that. I know we

they are.

fight back, Mister,

try to get

him

and

if

somebody

is

out to get me, then I

first."

Clarence sighed. He was a lawyer from Chicago. He had walked right out of his nice, quiet office onto a battlefield where warfare had been going on for years. It was not the

CLARENCE DARROW

82

was a place where men what was he doing here? and fought with no holds barred But he had to go on. "Now, tell me what happened in

pkce

for innocent spectators. It

Boise."

Richardson took up the story once more. "It didn't happen in Boise. The ex-Governor had his home in Caldwell, a small town near Boise. He was killed by a homemade bomb which had been attached to his gate; when he opened the gate well, that was that. Orchard confessed to the crime . Harry Orchard." Darrow looked at each man in turn, closely. "I want the truth. What connection is there between a man named Orchard and the officials of the Western Federation of Miners? Do any of you know Orchard? Is he a member of .

.

the Federation?"

One man spoke up,

"I've seen him around at a few meet" Never was anybody of any importance, except ings. " another man spoke up "he was supposed "Except to be the one responsible for the Independence depot bomb" ing. We all wondered Richardson added, "Haywood and Moyer knew him, slightly, but that is all. He hung around restaurants where the Federation officials usually ate there was a lot of suspicion of him at one time, that he was in the pay of the mine owners, but then it was decided he was just a harmless little guy who worked as a miner once in a while worked as a clerk sometimes worked here and there one of the kind who doesn't have any home or family or roots and looking for friends. We thought he might have done that Independence bombing because he might have thought the miners would admire him for it and he could be 'in* with

the Federation leaders."

"And that's all any of you know of him?" As they nodded, stretched, put on his coat. "Then where I is Boise, not here. Thanks for everything." belong Darrow got up,

CLARENCE DARROW

83

A

miner laughed. "I wonder if you'll be thanking us a month from now!" Darrow wondered, too. It was not only murder it could and probably was also a case of frame-up. A case whose roots were buried deep in fifteen years of bitterness and hatred and bad blood. Ruby met him at the station in Boise* Just the sight of her, looking pretty and clean and eager to see him, raised his spirits. He even liked to have her scold him: "Look at youl Your coat is all rumpled; your shirts are a sight! I've never understood how you can put on a dean shirt, and fifteen minutes later I can see people staring at you and thinking 'oh, that poor Mr. Darrow! wouldn't you think his wife would take better care of him than to let him run " around in a shirt a week old?' She had found a little bungalow for them and it was quite comfortable. After dinner they went to call on the Edgar Wilsons,

Wilson was a prominent Boise attorney. By

letter,

he had

agreed to come in with Darrow on behalf of the three defendants even though he was not in sympathy with the organizing of the Western Federation of Miners, even though he had been warned that no businessman in Boise would ever give him any practice if he did. Wilson was exactly the kind of man Darrow liked. He had high principles; he was honest; he believed, utterly, that anyone was entitled to his fair chance in court. From him Darrow heard more of the story. "Caldwell is right in the heart of the Coeur d'Alene mining district. When Steunenberg was governor he was hatec by the miners because he used his power of office to call ir Federal troops, declare martial law, and break their strike That was in 1904. He was living in Caldwell since he had retired from public office. One night, about eight o'clock, the town was shocked by a terrible explosion the bomb at

CLARENCE DARROW

84

Steunenberg's gates. Right away everyone thought:

miners getting even for 1904.

A

special train

It's

the

brought the

governor, the state attorney, sheriffs from Boise we're only thirty miles from Caldwell." Mrs. Wilson, for whom Ruby had felt an instantaneous liking,

spoke up. "It was a surprise

when Harry Orchard

week later and confessed. No one had ever heard of him. Not around here. And there were such peculit was as if he wanted to be ariar aspects to his arrest rested. He had parts of the bomb-making apparatus openly in his room. Not concealed. And some of the same string found at the gate was found on him." Before Darrow went to see his clients in jail the next day he studied the newspapers. Orchard's picture was there: the was arrested a

picture of a

man. Was he

little,

smiling, foolish-appearing, inoffensive

just a simple nut?

Darrow hoped

this

was

true.

He read on. The newspaper story covered columns on the front page. Suddenly a name leaped out at him: James McParland. Where had he heard that name before? Then he remembered.

A man

him and Mitchell

walking

down a corridor in front of Mine Workers. Mitchell's

of the United

man! Darrow changed his mind. Before he saw Haywood and Moyer and Pettibone he wanted to find out what McPar-

anger. Mitchell's warning: a dangerous

land was doing in this case. He went to Edgar Wilson's

office.

"McParland? I wish you would tell me how it happens that he is in this case but he is, in the most peculiar way," Wilson said. "For a week Orchard was not allowed to talk to anyone, after his first confession. That confession only said that he had done the bombing, all by himself. re-

No

porters could talk to him no ministers no officials. Then, suddenly, Orchard writes another confession and this time

CLARENCE DARROW

85

he names Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone as the men who paid him to do the deed." "Where does McParland ?" "I'm coming to that. Word has leaked out that this stranger, this man whom no one knows, was with Orchard for that whole week. Ate with him, practically lived with him. And now we get these newspaper stories of Orchard down on his knees saying he has been saved, he has found religion, he has become a reformed man and it is all due to his good and wonderful friend, Mr. McParland." Clarence shook his head, groggily. "I've heard of some strange jail practices but this is the weirdest. The state of Idaho either calls in or permits this man who is not an official, not a prison warden, not even a relative of Orchard's and turns over their prisoner, a confessed murderer, into his hands. My friend Mitchell is right. This is a dangerous man. A secret, mysterious man though I think I

could

tell

"What

you

his secret."

is it?"

is a man with a brilliant brain. I think he out to employers as a kind of trouble shooter; hires himself for sale only in the most difficult kinds of situations where his special genius for unscrupulous, audacious, bold scheming is needed." Wilson reached for the newspapers on his desk and stud-

"I think

he

ied them, thoughtfully. Then he gravely said, "Whatever he is private detective evil genius or what, I'm convinced that he talked Orchard into that confession. The

second one. Without him our three

men would

not be on

trial."

Darrow went to the Federal prison to see his client. First, he called on Haywood. He was curious about this labor leader. There were all kinds of stories about him. Bad or good, no one could deny his courage. It was a well-authenti-

CLARENCE DARROW

86

cated fact that he had fought, time and time again, as one man against gangs, and survived to fight again.

The cell he visited was horrible. It was damp, ill-smelling, rat-infested. Haywood seemed too big, too vital to be

and

contained in this small space; he seemed about to burst the very bars with his energy. The two men, lawyer and client, met and talked but for the most part they looked each other over, judging, weighing each other. glance they liked what they saw. Haywood was handsome, magnetic in personality, tough in fiber, a striking figure with his bold face and thick black

At

first

hair.

And he saw a lawyer who gave him the confidence he had hoped

would be pinning his life on and integrity. He liked the way, calmly that Darrow questioned him; he liked the fact

to find

this

Darrow's

and

quietly,

seeing that he

skill

Darrow took the cell cot, and that

himself comfortable on talked as easily as if the two were in a

off his coat,

parlor. Yet, ten minutes later the

made

two were in headlong

conflict.

to do with Steunenberg's killing. That was a stupid, senseless, wasteful business. But if you think I'm sorry he's dead, you're wrong. There's only one important thing in my life the union the Federation. I'd

"I

had nothing

go to the death chair any day if I thought that, by so doing, I might win for the miners a decent life. Mr. Darrow, you approve of trade unions. You know they are the only chance a workingman has to stop being treated like a dog and start living like a man. But you don't like our methods. You'd like it if we played patty-cake with the owners." Darrow's temper was as quick as Haywood's. "I tell you I saw it work. Negotiation. Arbitration. Sitting around a table to settle arguments." Haywood snorted. "Try to talk these western ers into arbitrating! I tell

mine own-

you they have one thought: to

CLARENCE

D ARROW

87

us. You've asked me some honest questions. Did I bombs on mine property? Did I burn mine buildings? plant Maybe I didn't do it with my own hands but I was glad it

smash

was done. Sure." "Violence doesn't settle anything," Clarence protested. The labor leader looked at him, pityingly. "You think not?

We start our strikes peacefully.

trouble, we'll give

me

it

right back.

But

And

if

somebody starts damaging

as far as

one way to convince a mine owner we mean business. With him, that's where it hurts. His property. He doesn't care if his hired hoodlums and gunmen get dumped; but burn down a little old shed on his property and he thinks twice about meddling with property, let

tell

you

that's the

the Federation." It might have been just an abstract argument between two men but for the fact that Haywood wanted to get on the stand and use his witness chair as a platform for speaking his

radical ideas.

He could not understand Darrow's hesitation.

Darrow had done the same thing when he had refused to defend Debs, but instead, used Debs' trial to give judge and jury a lesson in what were the rights of a trade union.

"Why won't you conduct the same kind of a case here?" Darrow exploded. "Because it would mean you would hang! I wasn't defending Debs on a charge of murder. And bad as the situation was then, it can't compare to the atmosphere of revenge that exists in Boise. They will kill you just to satisfy their wrath Steunenberg's death is a particularly horrible one." He would have liked to have added that the gentle, peaceful, saintly Debs would make one impression on a jury; Haywood quite another one. "Then," plainly Haywood did not like it, but he saw no choice. He was behind bars; Darrow was free; he would have to yield to the lawyer. "Then, what is your plan of defense?" "I don't know. I just got here,

remember?"

CLARENCE DARROW

88

From Moyer,

in the next

cell,

Darrow learned

that all

three defendants had known Orchard slightly. Pettibone had even fed the confessed murderer at his own table. Pettibone, said Moyer, was a friendly kind of man who liked everyone. "He's never learned to be suspicious, as I have. Or learned to measure a man, the way Bill Haywood does. Yet, none of us knew Orchard, really. He hung around the Federation meetings; he ran errands; he seemed harmless though after the Independence bombing we wondered if he had not done that, at the orders of the mine owners, in order to discredit us."

When Darrow

left

the

jail

he

felt as if

he had had a

glimpse into a jungle, into a life where men worked and fought and died by jungle laws. Not the laws he knew. Yet he was also absolutely convinced that the three men were

innocent of the charge against them. It seemed to Darrow, and to Wilson, that the key to the whole case was this man Orchard. They set themselves to finding out all they could about him. From Federation records they learned he had joined the miners' organization in 1899. He had never been elected to an office; in feet, he had worked as a miner only occasionally. The two men, with the help of the miners, worked day and night to trace back over decades the life story of Orchard. The picture they uncovered was a nasty one.

Orchard had been a petty crook all his life, though seldom He had abandoned a wife and small daughter and left them penniless, had married another woman (without bothering to divorce his first wife) and spent her money and then deserted her, had burned down a factory to collect insurance, had robbed his fellow miners of petty sums of money, had once plotted to kidnap a child and hold it for ransom, had burglarized a store. "It isn't even his history that is important. It is the personality I'm interested in." Darrow explained to Ruby. arrested.

CLARENCE DARROW

89

strolling, after dinner, down a country road that led from the outskirts of Boise to the distant mountains. It

They were

was one of Clarence's few free evenings and Ruby was determined to get him out of a chair and into the fresh, cool evening breeze. In spite of his excitement over this trial, she had seen it was wearing him down and sapping his strength.

"That's what I've been wondering/* she admitted. "I listen to people talk in the stores. I don't blame them for

thinking the Federation officials are guilty. They would have a reason revenge. But what reason would a mild, harmless looking little man like that have for doing such a

What would he get out of it?" "Headlines. The spotlight. Notoriety. Attention. I'm con-

thing?

a cheap, petty crook that not even the police could take seriously. The Federation considered him a nobody, a nuisance. For once in his life he wanted

vinced of

this!

All his

life

would make him seem important. He was perfectly satisfied when he was caught. He signed that first confession he wouldn't have wanted to share the credit for the bombing, even if there had been anyone else involved. Then McParland went to work on him/* "Frightened him, you mean?" "Possibly. Also probably showed him that he could get to

commit a crime

that

the spotlight by being a hero the man who saw the error of his ways and is now on the side of justice, bringing the Federation officials to stand trial."

Ever since his second confession Orchard had lived like a in the prison king. He had a comfortable, luxurious cottage grounds, the best of food and clothing, was waited on and served by prison officials. Still Darrow could not answer Haywood's question: how was he going to conduct the defense? The trial date was 'drawing near and even Wilson was worried. Orchard's con-

90

CLARENCE DARROW

had been a vague one and had not stated in what what time the three labor leaders had ordered or or way conspired with him to do the murder. The defense was left wondering what kind of a case they must fight and what kind of evidence the State would produce. fession

CHAPTER

i &

" o

Then came the break Darrow was praying for. Orchard's vanity was too much for his caution; the State lawyers had not reckoned with his craving for publicity. Orchard was permitted, just a week before the trial, to give an interview to the press. The morning after the interview Darrow came downstairs to breakfast in a worried and anxious mood. He and Wilson had worked late the night before; neither of them were satisfied with the organization of the defense, yet neither knew what else to do. They were working blind. They had no knowledge of the case against their clients. At the stove, pouring out Clarence's coffee, Ruby heard him walk to the breakfast table; heard him sigh as he eased himself into a chair. Her heart hurt for him. She had noticed how exhilarated, how swept up into energy and aliveness he had been when they first came to Boise. He was a fighter and the harder the trial, the more difficult the case, the more he was keyed up. But now his worry was dragging him down. She carried the coffee cup to the table and went back for the scrambled eggs and bacon. "Please, Clarence, take time this morning for a good breakfast. You work too late and you don't eat enough." She made the toast. "What " time did you come in last night? Clarence! I asked you She turned, struck by his silence. 91

CLARENCE DARROW

92

He was staring at the newspaper she had unfolded by his coffee nor his eggs. place. He had not touched "Clarence

He jumped

whatever

is

to his feet.

the matter

I"

"Never mind the

coffee,

Look this!

Orchard has given the newspapers the whole

names

places

is

dates

Ruby.

never hoped for a break like

at this! It's incredible! I

Everything the state

his

going to try to base people

Ruby!

We

its

case

have

story.

on a

de-

fense!"

She took the paper and read it. Orchard had indeed committed the supreme folly of revealing what the prosecution would have done almost anything to keep Darrow from knowing. "On March 10th I met with George Pettibone," she read, "and we discussed killing not only Steunenberg but also " Governor Peabody and She skipped down and read,

'Then on April 2nd

wood

"

I

received a letter from Bill Hay-

The door banged

open. It was Wilson, carrying another in He was as excited as Darrow. Ruby his hand. newspaper forced diem both to eat breakfast, and over their meal they It would take help not only and recollection of the three defendants as to memory where they actually were at the times and places Orchard mentioned but also help from the Federation, itself, to

planned what must be done.

the

prove

this.

Darrow pointed out another

fact. "It's

obvious that they

are going to try to convict them, not only by Orchard's claims that they paid him to do what he did, but also by

inflaming the jury against them. Orchard mentions almost every bit of violence that has happened in the West, in the

mining country, over the past fifteen years. He is willing to say he had a hand in almost everything just so long as he can " also implicate the three defendants. That means

CLARENCE DARROW "It

means we will have to cover every

mentions

for the past fifteen years.

We

93

date, every event he have work to do."

Orchard's newspaper interview had stated that the three men had met with him in Colorado and plotted the murder of Steunenberg, Governor Peabody, army officers, mine owners, prominent senators, and newspapermen. It was

Darrow to find out exactly where Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone were during the times actually mentioned: it was necessary, then, to get proof. Wires and telegrams flew back and forth between Boise and Denver. Richardson rounded up miners who had been with the defendants on those days of the supposed plotting and sent them by fast easy for

train to appear as witnesses for the defense.

For

all

the other charges over the long, fifteen-year-old

war between the Federation and the miners once it was known that Darrow needed help, help poured in. All day and all night miners were coming and going, bringing to the lawyers' offices proof of what happened during this

Haywood was making a on the same he was speech night supposed to have burned a mine shaft, proof that Moyer had been in conference with four other union men on the day he was supposed to have strike or that strike, proof that

paid Orchard for the Independence depot bombing. It was a dizzy week. Each hour brought more evidence from the Federation to bolster up the defense case. But

Darrow and Wilson had each

tions, question

evidence or

The day wood was

better

still

of the trial

to

be

to take the evidence, take deposiuntil they were sure they had

man

a reliable witness.

came

all

too soon. Only Bill Haywas to

tried at this time; each defendant

But everyone knew that victory or dewould affect the others; Orchard had claimed that all three had paid him to commit the crime. Darrow and Wilson met the three other attorneys who

have a separate

case.

feat in this trial

were to help in the actual

trial

proceedings

Richardson,

CLARENCE DARROW

94

John Nugent, legal advisor to the Silver City local of the Federation, and Fred Miller, a lawyer from Seattle who had defended the Federation in the Coeur d'Alene. Together the five

men walked

to the courtroom. Set in a small square,

were already crowded with people; they made their way through hisses and boos from some and cheers and whispered words of courage from others. Inside, every seat was taken. People were standing at the the green lawns and the streets surrounding

it

The

defense panel of lawyers seated themselves at their table. There was a stir in the room as a door at the

back.

opened and a deputy sheriff brought in the prisoner to beside his lawyers. Bill Haywood's bold vitality had not been the least diminished by his stay in a cell; he dominated

side sit

the room, sharing distinction only by the curiosity directed

toward Darrow.

Haywood was so

leaned over to whisper to Clarence but there

much noise he could not be heard.

Suddenly there was a hush. Judge Fremont

Wood had

entered by the back door and ascended the three steps that led to his high desk. With the banging of his gavel, the clerk stood

and

called the case to order. Everyone had stood entered; now they started to find their

when Judge Wood

but the judge, in his black, flowing robes, still stood and faced a little toward the American flag that stood at his right. Gravely he faced it, then just as gravely looked out seats

over the audience.

With

that

moment

there

came the sud-

den realization to the people in that room that a man was on trial here for his life. It was sensation that had brought most of the audience; others had come out of sympathy; now they were all quiet, sober, thoughtful, a little abashed. But if it was pin-drop quiet inside, the noise from the courtyard was like a heavy surf beating against the walls. Feeling for and against the defendants was running so high

CLARENCE DARROW that there

were frequent

fist-fights

95

and more frequent name-

calling arguments. The State lawyers rose to outline their case. It

anticlimax. Orchard

had already given

it

away

was an

in the news-

papers.

Wilson replied, then, with a brief denial of guilt and a motion to have the case dismissed for lack of the slightest evidence against Haywood. Motion denied. Judge Wood ordered the

trial to

go on.

The State called its witnesses. One by one they took the stand to tell of the night of the bombing, of Orchard's arrest, of his confessions. The audience was getting restless. These were minor, unimportant actors in the drama. It was almost time for court to adjourn for the day before Harry Orchard was called to the stand. No banging of the gavel could stop people from getting to their feet, climbing onto their seats, to see him better. Flanked by guards in khaki he walked down the aisle. He was short, sleek, plump much plumper than he had been at the time of his arrest red-faced, and smiling. He smiled at the judge, at the jury, at the audience.

"A confessed murderer," Richardson murmured to Darrow. "But you'd never think so he acts like he is doing us all a favor. benevolent friend of justice." hero.

A

A

The prosecution gently led Orchard through every detail of his confession and over his alleged story that Haywood had asked him to kill Steunenberg and had paid him to do so. Orchard told a tight, convincing story; he was a good witness, never stumbling or contradicting himself. Either he's told it to McParland or McParland has told it to

him, so often, that he almost believes

it,

Barrow

thought.

But never did Orchard look with more self-satisfied kindthan he did when he glanced at Haywood. There was no question that he was making a profound impression of

liness

CLARENCE DARROW

96

honesty and straightforwardness, to both judge and jury. The big room was still and listening as Orchard went methodically through his story. That night, after a long conference with the other lawand keyed-up, yers, Darrow went home. He was nervous tense. Orchard's seli-assurance worried him; it would take a lot to shake the impression he had made on the jury. "If the jury only realized

it

if

they only had the ex-

perience lawyers have they would have distrusted that story just because he never once slipped or contradicted himself,"

Ruby. He strode up and down the "Honest witnesses don't remember Honest witnesses do make mistakes."

Darrow

room, unable to that well.

told

sit still.

"Don't you think you should try to sleep, Clarence?"

Ruby

asked.

There was a knock on the door, A broad-faced man, beaming and smiling, stood in the hallway a second, then he advanced to meet Darrow, hand outstretched. "I'm Billy Cavanaugh," he said. "I just wanted to tell you I think you are wonderful for what you are doing. And if there is anything I can do to help I'm not a miner I'm a stonecutter, by trade, Mr. Darrow but workingmen stand together." "Thanks, Mr. Cavanaugh." Darrow rubbed the back of his head.

This interruption, kindly

made him more

nervous,

more

was meant, only "But there's noth-

as it

tense.

ing" "You got a headache, Mr. Darrow? I see you rubbing your you just lie down here and let Billy give you a mas" and before Clarence sage you'll see I'll fix it right up knew what was happening he was flat on his stomach on the couch, and the deft, strong, gentle hands of the stonecutter head

were kneading the taut muscles at the back of his head. Immediately the nerves were soothed. In ten minutes he was fast asleep.

Ruby and

the stranger tiptoed into the kitchen. "I don't

CLARENCE DARROW

97

know what kind Providence brought you

here,

Mr. Cava-

naugh, but please come again!" "As often as you need me I appreciate what Mr. Darrow " I want to help and as I'll be here is doing every night as he had he let himself out the back door. come, abruptly Every night after that Billy Cavanaugh was waiting for Darrow to come home; every night he gave him massages and alcohol rubs to help him sleep. Ruby was more than just grateful. She was deeply touched. It had been a new experience for her, to walk down streets and have people turn their backs when she approached, to feel their cold dislike and even open hatred. It was a shock, the first time she had overheard her husband called "evil" and "perverted" and a consorter of bad, violent

men. For Clarence,

hands were a lifesaver. The case, as the State attorneys proceeded with their witnesses, grew grimly serious. They were weaving a tight web of the facts that Orchard claimed, the hints that others gave, the wild statements of

Billy's

still

others, to prejudice the

minds of any

jury.

Now it was his

turn.

To

everyone's surprise

it

was Rich-

who

cross-examined Orchard. Darrow wanted it that way; he felt that Richardson was the most dramatic lawyer of the five of them. But as the day went on it was obvious that Richardson was getting nowhere. He could not shake Orchard's story. He could not get him to admit to a single

ardson

lie.

Orchard recited

his tale as if

he had committed

memory. There was a hurried consultation

it

to

at the defense table.

"We are going to have to change tactics.

Forget his story."

Darrow and Wilson were urgent in this demand. "We have witnesses to disprove what he has said. Go in there, Richardson, and attack the man. Show him up for what he is."

When court resumed after the recess,

it

was

as if

a shock

CLARENCE DARROW

98

had run through the room and spread out into the halls. Newspapermen became alert. The lawyer was ignoring the confession and the crime; he was after Orchard. "And isn't it true, Mr. Orchard, that you deserted your first

wife?"

"Well, not exactly" "Answer yes or no." "Yes."

"And you self

deserted her when she had no support for heror your baby daughter?"

"Yes,

but"

"You committed bigamy by marrying another woman?" " "Yes. I guess

not true, Mr. Orchard, that you were arrested for burning down a store to collect the insurance?" On and on it went, the whole long history of perjury, crime, petty thefts, robbery, misdemeanors and felonies, "Is

it

treacheries to his friends, the vile treatment of

women who

had loved and trusted him. Orchard squirmed on the stand. He stopped smiling. He frantically called on God to witness that he had become a changed man but he could not get away from the truth. And gradually, there appeared a picture far different than the jury had had of this man. A mask had been stripped away and what was underneath was not pretty.

He was dismissed. The defense followed up, quickly, with its witnesses who took Orchard's story apart and were able to dispute

Haywood had been miles away when to meet him. Haywood had been seen company of others when he was supposed to be conits facts.

Orchard had claimed in the

spiring alone with Orchard. And where were the letters were they not Haywood was supposed to have written? in court? produced

Why

The trial was moving fast to its climax. Most of the questioning had been left to the other lawyers;

it

would be up to

CLARENCE DARROW

99

Clarence Barrow to carry the whole weight of the case in the final appeal to the jury. He was more tense than ever. The defense had been good and solid, but there were men

he knew, who had started the case hating Haythey thought him responsible for keeping trouble stirred up in the mining country. Could the facts convince them, against their prejudices? That night, before he was to speak, Billy Cavanaugh came as usual. Ruby and Mrs. Wilson were taking a walk

on the

jury,

wood because

together. Billy gently massaged the shoulder muscles; his fingers to Clarence's neck. As he touched the nerves be-

moved up hind the

left ear,

Clarence

moaned and

jerked his head

back, sharply.

"What is it, Mr. Darrow? Did I hurt you?" "No. Don't tell Mrs. Darrow. I'm afraid there's something wrong there. It's a constant pain and has been for the past three days. I don't want anyone to know of it, not now." Experimentally, Billy touched the spot again. This time the pain was so intense that Darrow flung himself away, yelling.

"You aghast.

can't get up there tomorrow with " "That must be terrible

that!" Billy

was

"Don't say a word about it. That's orders. Would you want me to let Haywood down?" There was no answer to that. Billy went on with his rubbing; Ruby came back shortly. But it was hours before Darrow could sleep and then only fitfully. Yet the next day, after the State lawyers had finished their impassioned plea to the jury to find Haywood guilty, Darrow rose to his feet with no indication of pain on his face. Today the courtroom was packed; the doors were open so that die crowds in the halls might catch a glimpse of him.

He began to speak. He spoke for eleven hours. Recesses were announced; the court adjourned for lunch; afterwards

CLARENCE DARROW

100

Barrow picked up where he had

left off

and went on speak-

Eleven hours without notes of any kind. Even the beginningwhere he traced, step by step, day by day, the actions of his client Haywood and die actions of Orchard held the audience spellbound. All the confusion of examinaing.

tion of this witness, and cross-examination of that one, fell away. For the first time the audience and the ludge and jury i_ i Heard exactly where the stories of the two men were entirely different.

Ruby's eyes were ordinarily sharp enough that she could not have missed the physical pain Darrow was hiding. But today he was so much beyond himself; so powerfully he spoke, that she could only watch him with pride and love.

True, his broad shoulders were stooped at times, as he wandered up and down in front of the them the box,

He had lost weight.

jury

telling

His brown hair was thinner. But he was fighting, and fighting mad. When he spoke of Orchard his contempt and fury poured out of him, making him bigger and straighter than he was* "I sometimes wonder whether here in Idaho or anywhere in the country a man can be placed on trial and lawyers seriously ask to take a life of a human being upon the testimony of Harry Orchard. For God's sake! what sort of a community exists up here in the state of Idaho that sane men should ask it? If Harry Orchard has religion now, I hope I may never get it." story.

The

disgust on Darrow's face was real. He loathed hypoand Orchard's constant calling upon God, his constant claim to have been saved by religion, had infuriated Darrow as nothing else had. crites,

"Before Orchard got religion, he was bad enough, but it to religion to make him totally depraved. What does mean? It means it means

remained

religion kindliness. I ask

means

love;

charity; it least

you whether there was the

look of pity, the least sign of regret, the least feeling of sor-

CLARENCE DARROW row when

this

man

101

sought to hand over his friends to the

executioner."

Darrow read from Orchard's confession. "Listen to this what he has written: 'There was a dear little girl born to us that spring and thus my dear little wife was no longer this is

able to look after the cheese making as she formerly had. I rented a nice house in town but my dear wife would often complain and plead with me to stay home/ This is the same wife and child this villain deserted and left to starve. Never sent

them

a penny."

From Orchard he turned to the story of Bill Haywood. He did not try to paint Haywood a saint, but the true picture of a passionately devoted, honest labor leader.

"There is no way to give Moyer, Haywood or Pettibone back the eighteen months they have spent in the Boise jail. These are all part of the premium one gets and has always received for his services to his fellowmen. For the world is the same now as it always has been, and if a man is so insane that he wants to go out and work for the poor and the oppressed and the despised, for the men who do not own the tools, the newspapers, the courts, the machinery and the organization of society, these are the wages he receives to"

day Darrow's voice became so

so gentle, that people strained to hear. He spoke slowly and he looked at each member of the jury, one after another, intently, compellingly, directly, placing each word carefully into their minds. soft,

"I speak for the poor, for the weak, for the weary, for that long line of men who, in darkness and despair, have borne

human race. Their eyes are upon you men of Idaho tonight. If you kill Haywood, your act

the labors of the

twelve

be applauded by many. In the railroad offices of our great city men will applaud your names; if you decree his death, among the spiders of Wall Street there will go up paeans of praise for these twelve good men and true. But if

will

CLARENCE DARROW

102

" should be not his voice rang out sharply will who those reverently guilty in this case there are still bow their heads and thank you out on our broad prairies where men toil with their hands, through our mills and

your verdict

factories

"

and down deep under the

and women

men who

labor,

earth, thousands of

men who

suffer,

men

women and

children weary with care and toil these will kneel tonight and ask their God to guide your hearts/'

He was finished. There was nothing more he could say. When he sat down there was a stir in the courtroom, but it

was not

restlessness. It

was

as if

everyone had suddenly

expelled their breaths in one deep, universal sigh. Even the judge sat for a second before he turned to the jury to give

them

They were led away by the be isolated for the period of their deliberations and until they could reach a verdict. Darrow and Ruby went home. Neither of them could sleep. Shortly, the Wilsons came over, then Richardson and their final instructions.

bailiff, to

Nugent. Ruby made coffee and sandwiches. They sat talking a little, but there was so little to say. They stayed together because they needed each other's support and comfort.

In the morning, before

it

was yet

light, there

was a tap

on the window. Ruby opened it. A miner stuck his head in and said, breathlessly, "Just heard verdict jury voted eleven to one/' he cursed, angrily, "for conviction." Darrow felt himself grow sick with disillusion. He had hoped so much! Even though the odds seemed impossible,

he had hoped. His ear was aching now, with an alarming pain which he must somehow conceal from the others. "It isn't official/' Richardson was begging them not to give up. "If it was official we would have been notified first; this must just be a rumor. Yet how would a rumor know it was eleven to one?" They looked at each other and could find nothing to say.

CLARENCE DARROW

They could not eat

103

the food that

Ruby brought them; they drank coffee and sat, silent, each in his own bitter thoughts. At six-thirty a messenger from the court arrived. The jury had notified they were ready. Just as they were, unshaven, without coats or hats, the lawyers for the defense hurried through the dawn to the courthouse. A few people, curious, and a few others who had heard the rumor, were already at the doors.

The

bailiff let

the lawyers in

first.

They found Haywood already seated at the familiar table. In a few moments the State attorneys came. Then Orchard. Finally the clerk stood up once again for the last time in that trial and banged his gavel. Judge Wood entered. His black robes gave him the appearance, Darrow

thought, of an executioner. The judge summoned the jury and the twelve men filed in, one after another, to take their places in the jury box. "Gentlemen of the jury, have you arrived at a verdict?"

"We have, Your

Honor." "Will the foreman please read the verdict?"

"Not Guilty!"

The

only sound was the shock of consternation from the prosecution table. Then there was uproar. Bill Haywood could not restrain a shout of relief and happiness; the lawyers for the defense clapped each other on the back, ran over to shake hands with the jury now released from duty and now just twelve smiling, jovial men. The clerk banged

Wood

his gavel in vain. Judge wisely and quickly withdrew so that his presence would not be a check to the celebration.

The audience split some coming up to congratulate Haywood, others comforting the State attorneys, and still others who ran out to spread the news into the streets. The jurymen wanted to talk to Darrow. They wanted to tell him how their minds had changed once he had begun his final plea.

For Darrow,

this

was all a nightmare. His

first

great burst

CLARENCE DARROW

104

of joyful emotion had communicated itself to the overstrained nerves and particularly to the strange pain in his ear. His head felt as if it would burst. He kept trying to

he wanted

much

to join in the victory feeling but the agony only grew worse. He had a vague idea that he was saying the right things smile;

so

and shaking hands with people;

that he was walking out into

the sunlight, through crowds of shouting, excited, yelling miners that there was a victory parade forming that he

was refusing to join And then, somehow, he was home and in bed and

Ruby

had

called a doctor. Just before the shot of morphine blacked out the world, he heard the doctor say he had a dangerously infected left ear.

That night, in the streets, there were torchlight parades and the wild jubilation of the miners, celebrating. Inside the Darrow cottage, behind dosed blinds, Ruby sat fearfully watching beside the sleeping Clarence. Mrs. Wilson was on guard by the front door, quieting those who came and knocked and wanted to speak to the man who had done most to win for Haywood. She collected the telegrams which grew into a huge pile on the table beside the door. The doctor was puzzled. "It's something beyond my experience," he confessed in a low voice to Ruby. "It appears to be a mastoid, but there is no swelling and I have never heard of a mastoid without it. I would much rather not treat it. You had better get the advice of an ear specialist."

The Darrows left hurriedly for Chicago. The doctors there could only say the same thing: it was the oddest case of a mastoid they had ever seen. Without swelling, they could not even diagnose it with any certainty. They could not lance it without the swelling. The next weeks were torture for both Clarence and Ruby.

Without sleeping rest at all.

pills it

was impossible for him to get any

CLARENCE DARROW

And

came a

in the midst of this

frantic plea

A young man

ness in the

105

Haywood trial. Adams had been arrested

from a wit-

by the name of

early in the trial; the prosecution held over his head a vague charge of having killed a claim jumper in Idaho. This charge was to prevent his

Steve

testifying for Haywood, but Steve Adams had agreed to go on the stand as a defense witness if Clarence Darrow would

stand by

"You

him when

his

own

trial

came up.

can't go back there! You're

much

too

ill."

Ruby

pleaded.

He had the courage to could have bought his way out of his own trial by his silence. I promised him I'd stand by him and I must." The trial took place in the small town o Rathdrum in northern Idaho. The trip there was almost unendurable for Clarence and a never-ending ordeal for Ruby. She used the diner of the train for sterilizing her instruments because the ear had to be kept irrigated and constantly drained and treated. Later she had to boil the instruments in pans wherever she could find a stove in a train depot, in hotel rooms, in restaurants "I've given

come

my word

to

forth with the truth.

Adams.

He

and this went on for two months. There was scarcely a moment in court when Clarence was free of pain. All night long Ruby heated and reheated hotwater bottles, which sometimes relieved him enough to let

him sleep. Adams was

acquitted.

But no sooner was

that trial over

than George Pettibone was called to stand trial in Boise as the second defendant Orchard had named. Darrow went to Boise. He got as far as cross-examining Orchard once more when he collapsed. From a wheel chair he made his appeal to the jury. The doctor who had wheeled him in refused to allow him to wait for the verdict; the Darrows must go immediately to a specialist in California.

CLARENCE DARROW

106

When word came to them, in Los Angeles, that Pettibone had been acquitted and Moyer discharged without trial, Clarence cared nothing about it, one way or the other. His world had narrowed down to a hospital bed and the only sensation he knew was pain. Ruby begged the doctors to do something. They could only repeat that Until there was a swelling they could not be sure it was mastoid and until they were sure they could not lance, as they would ordinarily do. There were a few times when Clarence felt like talking but she dreaded these because the physical pain had brought with

it

mental

distress.

He was

tortured

by doubts

of himself. It was at such a time that he told her of his conflict

with Haywood.

know

"

"

he moved restlessly on the bed perI envy him. He is a man with he is Sometimes right. haps a single mind, convinced of himself and his cause. It gives him power and purpose and direction. I am never sure of anything. For that reason I could never be a leader of men." "I don't

"A lawyer

not a leader?" she tried to joke. joking. "I don't even have faith in the

But he was not

law. I fight for justice, yes. But the machinery of the law sometimes despise. I can't even have that satisfaction, that

I

I believe

wholeheartedly in what I

am doing. But why can't

be sure of a faith or a philosophy or a religion, as others are? Why must I always twist and turn and find loopholes I

and ask embarrassing questions?" She took his hand. "If you were sure of one faith, you would be intolerant of others. Then you would not be as

To defend people you have to put yourself in their place, always. could you do that if you believed in something to the point where you were prejudiced about it? It would be different if you were a labor lawyer, like Mr.

good a lawyer.

How

Richardson, but you have to defend and understand

and

CLARENCE DARROW sympathize with so ence!

He

many

107

different kinds of people. Clar-

you aren't listening to had snatched his hand

me

"

away and was gingerly, tenthe his ear. She leaned forbehind derly exploring region ward to see what he was doing and then ran headlong from the room, calling the doctor.

The

swelling had finally appeared. Now the doctors could operate. When

told

him how close he had come

that

it

was

all

it

was

to losing his

all

over they

life;

and now

over and he was well again and strong,

Ruby

could also tell him what she had been at great pains to conceal never allowing newspapers in his room that there had been a financial crisis and all the money they had saved was gone. They were penniless.

CHAPTER

7

Back in Chicago Clarence quickly threw off the physical weakness following the operation and with it he lost the mental despondency. He was fighting once again. The financial crisis and the wreck of many small businesses brought him in many new clients. He had gone into debt for hospital bills. To pay these, and to put Paul back into business, he took every case that came his way. Young Paul, now graduated from Dartmouth, had proved to be both a great satisfaction and something of a puzzle to his father. They were so different in temperament. Paul had his mother's love of routine and method and quiet; like his uncle Everett, he read for pleasure never, like Clarence, for material for arguments. But it was impossible for Clarence not to be proud of this good-looking, well-liked, responsible and intelligent son of his, even though their paths in life would never be the same.

His father had helped Paul in his first business venture: setting up a small bank. Paul had made a success of it, then he found that the trustees were cheating the depositors and his honesty forced him to close the bank, immediately, even though at a loss to the Darrows. Clarence and he were of one

mind on

this.

Now he needed help again. As soon as 108

Clarence was able

CLARENCE to afford

it,

DARROW

he loaned Paul ten thousand

109 dollars.

With

this

the young man bought a gas plant in Greeley, Colorado and so well did he operate it that years later, when the plant

was sold, Clarence found himself a rich time in his life.

man

for the

first

Meanwhile, during these years of 1907 and 1908, while debts were slowly being paid back and Clarence's practice was once again building up, Ruby was equally determined that he should enjoy life. Something, she felt, had to make up for the sufferings he had gone through; if he worked hard for others he had a right to expect some comfort for himself. For this reason, even though they were broke, she refused to consider living cheaply.

She searched and found a nine-room apartment with huge windows overlooking the lake and park, a library for quiet hours and an enormous living room for parties. These nine rooms she cleaned herself. She did all the cooking. She repaired the furniture, even getting down on her hands and knees to dye every inch of the carpet.

This was of his

to

be Clarence's mudi-loved

home

for the rest

life.

Here came all of his old friends and many new ones. Here were resumed the gay evenings, noisy with talk and laughter and argument and songs. Here the Evolution Club met and gave weekly forums on every subject from biology, sociol-

and anthropology, to comparative religion. Around Clarence and Ruby flocked the young students of the city,

ogy,

because here they could find a free atmosphere to say anything on their minds. In spite of the fact that he was known to have been a

lawyer for unpopular causes, he was also much sought after, now, by big corporations. His radical friends were horrified; Darrow only laughed at them. Corporations and rich companies were facts of

life.

He

couldn't change

them but he

CLARENCE

110

DARROW

could charge them plenty to make up for all the free work he did for the poor. It is possible that never in his life had Clarence been so

He had work to keep his mind active; an income best of all, steadily growing. He had friends. And

contented. that was

he had in Ruby a wife he loved and a good companion. If there was any regret it was that Paul was so far away in Greeley, Colorado; but he was doing fine there. It was that way until April of 19 11. Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, came to see Clarence at home. The Darrows had known Gompers for many years. Ruby greeted him with pleasure. It was one of the rare evenings when she and Clarence were alone; she took Gompers to the library and there they found Clarence, sitting at his ease, relaxed and comfortable, in his favorite wicker chair. Sam! I'm glad to see you/' He hoisted himself out of the chair and ambled across the room to shake hands. "I hope you will still be glad, when I tell you why I am here." Gompers plunged right into it, wasting no time. "The McNamara brothers have been arrested in Los Angeles. A man named Ortie McManigal has confessed to a

"Come

in,

national dynamite bombing plot and implicated the McNamaras. But the real reason they have been arrested is because of the bombing of the Los Angeles Times Building." "I've

been reading about

on guard. He had decided,

it/'

Darrow admitted. He was he would never

after Boise, that

again take a labor case that involved murder. The Los Angeles Times bombing had resulted in the death of twenty

men.

"The McNamaras

are innocent!" Gompers protested. "It the same story as the Haywood case they've got a McManigal this time instead of an Orchard. The Los Angeles

is

Times

owned by the Chandlers; they have a record of hating unions as if unions were poison. Even the kidnapping is

CLARENCE is

the same

DARROW

James McNamara was shipped out from

111 Illi-

nois to stand trial in Los Angeles without any extradition papers, and his brother John was grabbed out o his office in Indianapolis. You did it once, for Haywood and the

Western Federation of Miners I'm asking you to defend the McNamaras/' "No. Absolutely not. A plain murder case is one thing. All you have to do is prove your client didn't do it. Just prove facts. But a labor case is something else. You said it yourself: back of the charge is the warfare that has been going on between the unions and the employers. There is so

much

that

You

emotional uproar, so many other issues involved, don't defend a man against the charge of murder. you have to defend his right to organize a union. You have

to defend his right to use violence.

no matter on whose

And I don't like violence,

side I find it."

Gompers took his hat and coat and walked to the door. "Think about it, Clarence. You are the only hope those

men

have."

Long

after

he had gone Clarence

wicker chair, came to the door and looked in. sat in his

head drooping. Ruby Quietly, she went then to the bedroom and started packing

his

their suitcases.

As well

as she

knew her husband, she knew

his decision.

On

the train to Los Angeles, Darrow studied all the newspaper reports of the case. He talked a little about it to

Ruby.

"The McNamaras

are charged with dynamiting

more

than a hundred bridges, powerhouses, theatres, plants and between 1906 and 1911. As far as what happened in Los Angeles I would rather wait until I get there, to get

factories,

the facts straight." She leaned back against the plush seat. The train was passing through Colorado; she wished they could stop and see Paul. It would have meant a happy moment in the

CLARENCE

112

DARROW

journey and she was worried about the grimness in Clarence's manner.

"Why

did you decide to defend the McNamaras?" she

asked.

"I was wondering

when you were going

to get

around

to asking me.

Broke my promise, didn't I?" he smiled at her. "I took the case, not because of these two men, but because it seems to me to be a question of whether or not men have the right to form a union. Chandler of the Los Angeles Times is making no bones about it; he says he will hang the

McNamaras, and thereby keep unions out of the city forThe way I see it, there are all kinds of men in unions bad ones, good ones, blind ones, intelligent ones. Just as there are the same in employers. But the employers have the money, the power, the organization if there is going to be warfare I want it a fair and equal fight and the only weapon ever.

the workingman has is his organized power, his collective power. No one has the right to use a murder charge as a cat's-paw, to do the dirty work of smashing a union." He was silent for a moment. "I wonder what kind of men the McNamaras are. First there was Debs. A saint. A

strong

man. Then Haywood. A thunderbolt, all energy and drive and brain concentrated in one single force. I wonder" he sighed. "I guess what I am really wondering is why I dislike this case so much. I have a bad feeling about

and

gentle, loving

Perhaps I am just getting old." She looked sideways at him, studying him. He was older. The battles he had been through had marked and lined his it.

face.

Heavy furrows creased die corners of his nose and mouth and the flesh sagged around them. His hair was gray. But the impression she had was one of greater strength in his face now than when she first knew him. They stepped off the platform in Los Angeles into heat and humidity and into the arms of dozens of and reporters

CLARENCE DARROW photographers. There were other

113

men

there, not easily

men, tight-lipped and cold-eyed. the time the Darrows were in Los Angeles, were they ever free of these men. They were detectives and identified: suspicious

Never, in

all

they shadowed Clarence and

Ruby wherever they went.

Samuel Gompers had arranged for an office for Barrow. The American Federation of Labor was vitally interested in this trial for

many

reasons: because

John

J.

McNamara

was secretary of the International Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, a member union of the A. F. of L., and also because the outcome of this trial would mean victory or defeat for many years in organizing unions in Los Angeles. The A. F. of L. was paying Darrow. They would hire any other lawyers he wished.

Darrow picked men of widely different and backgrounds points of view to be his associate lawyers. Harriman was a Socialist; Le Compte Davis was conJob servative and had no great respect for unions; Joseph Scott was a leading Catholic layman in the city. Later he added Judge McNutt, a former member of the Supreme Court o Deliberately,

Indiana.

As soon

as the defense staff

was organized they began to

dig for the facts of the case.

had happened on the first of the previous October. The Los Angeles Times building was almost deserted, the paper had been written and printed and distributed. Only twenty men were still at work in the large building. Suddenly, in the alley behind the newspaper there was an explosion. It was only a small one; then there was a second as the gas pipe It

broke.

The ink in the barrels

ink for the newspaper print-

and soon the whole building was a sheet ing caught The second of flames. explosion had blown out one entire fire

back wall. The unfortunate victims of the blast and the fire were telegraph operators, linotype operators,

side of the

printers, machinists, compositors

and pressmen.

CLARENCE DARROW

114

The whole

America was up in arms over the tragedy. "What do the McNamara brothers say about it?" Joseph of

Scott asked Darrow.

"I don't know. I haven't talked to them. But I will see them in jail tomorrow/' Both John and James denied any knowledge of the Los Angeles Times bombing, they denied any participation in the dynamite plots they had been accused of and which ranged over a large part of the United States. Darrow liked both men. James, the eldest, was twenty-eight; slim, gay with an Irish poetic gaiety, and much worried about his younger brother John who was a quiet and well-read, though poorly educated man. The defense knew it had a job on its hands. The charges were so many though the Los Angeles Times bombing was the one they had been arrested for that it meant they must hire men to help them dig through the tangled mass of

accusations to get to the truth. One special staff of investigators concentrated on the Los Angeles bombing.

Another group of

investigators, aided

by a man named

Bert Franklin, painstakingly combed through the

lists

of the

hundred or more prospective jurors who might be called for this trial. Even though only twelve would be chosen it was necessary to know something of each one background, jobs, previous jury duty and how each had voted, and so on. This was always done in important law cases, by both the defense and the prosecution attorneys. Bert Franklin, a former Los Angeles detective who was well acquainted in the city, was a stranger to Darrow but he had come well

recommended. Ruby saw almost nothing of her husband. He seldom came home for dinner and frequently not until after midnight. Hour after hour he studied reports, trying to get two clear pictures in his head: one, the story the prosecution

would

tell

of the dynamite -plots

and the Los Angeles

CLARENCE DARROW

115

bombing; the other, where were his two clients at those times? What were they doing? How could he prove them innocent?

Ruby became

alarmed. During every legal battle she had Clarence had always seemed to gather strength in, and energy as the trial drew near and he organized his own

seen

case.

him

But not

this time.

Every day the lines on his face grew deeper and the slouch in his shoulders more pronounced. "I

am so worried about him.

she confided to Lincoln Steffens.

There's something wrong/* Steffiens, the writer who was

rapidly growing famous in America for his book called The Shame of the Cities and who was known as a muckraker, a

person

come

who uncovered

political

and business

to Los Angeles expressly for this

trial.

scandals,

had

He and

the

Darrows had become friends. "I think so, too, but I don't know what it is. One minute he is full of fight and the next minute he acts as if he is already beaten. Nervous and jumpy, snapping at people and apologizing next day. I'm afraid he's come to the same conclusion I have: that this case cannot be won. The McNamaras cannot get a fair trial, not with this hysteria in the city. I've already told Clarence that I have seen some influential men in the state and talked to them about settling this quietly let the McNamaras plead guilty to some minor offense, to satisfy the public

clamor for their punishment,

but drop the bombing charges."

"What did Clarence

say to that?"

he was excited and interested. Then he said, no. The McNamaras and the American Federation of Labor would never stand for it. They want Clarence to go into court and clear up the whole mess, go in and expose Chandler and the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association for arresting two men just because they want to discredit the

"At

first

unions."

CLARENCE DARROW

116

Ruby's eyes flashed. "I wish we were out of this case! I feel as if I were being smothered in spider webs everywhere I go I am followed. My telephone conversations are listened to. People I trust turn out to be enemies. All the scheming and intrigue and trickery!" Darrow could not tell her just how thick the webs were. In almost every legal case a lawyer must be something of a detective.

He must

investigate for himself the truth of the

charges about his clients; he must try to find out in advance what the opposing attorneys have up their sleeves in the way of surprise witnesses or information. But Darrow had found that this case was not the usual

out about each other through legitimate methods. His mail was opened before it reached his office. Everyone he spoke to was either followed or questioned by the Burns Detective Agency, nor was Clarence sure that private people were paying Burns or the prosecuting attorney, himself. He discovered that one of his secretaries was a Burns detective and was making copies of everything that came into the defense polite detective

work of two

sides trying to find

office.

There was nothing for Darrow to do but to play the same game himself, though his means were limited. He told the secretary he knew his identity; he would let him go on working (if he didn't, some new person would be planted on him), but the secretary must just, please, inform him exactly what reports he handed over to Fredericks, the prosecuting attorney! Darrow concocted a secret code. All the defense lawyers used this when they wanted to write something really private. And he hired several of the Burns detectives to report back to him exactly what the prosecuting attorney's office

was finding in their investigations of the plots! It was dirty

work.

He hated

it.

so-called

bombing

Every day he found him-

CLARENCE DARROW

117

hating the case, the city, the intrigue and the tricks. His own employees in the office were shadowed, threatened, bribed, kidnapped told to quit Darrow or they would never get another job in Los Angeles. Nearly a year of this had gone by, and now the trial date was drawing near. Trade unionists were flocking into the

self

and huge mass meetings were held to support the winning of freedom for the McNamaras. Job Harriman was rarely in the defense office; he was running for Mayor of the city and was doing a good job of speaking to the people of the city, telling them of the innocence of the McNamaras. There were huge parades. Workingmen marched in solid formations through the streets. They wore buttons with "Free the McNainaras" on them; they gave the last pennies

city

out of their worn pocketbooks for the defense. One night Darrow worked even later than usual. The rest of the staff had gone home but there was still a pile of

must read. He went through reports before him which he .them one by one, making notes. He was tired; it was a temptation, when he came to the last report, to shove it aside But he opened it. hour later he was knocking on Le Compte Davis s door. "I'm sorry to get you out of bed," he told the sleepy office right lawyer. "But we must have a conference in the wait" can't It away. Help me call and rouse the others. " but Davis "Clarence are you sick, man? You look was speaking to the night air. Darrow had turned on his heel and was hurrying away. It was almost morning before they were all assembled in the office. Darrow faced them. He stood behind his desk and His face was drawn and gray and leaned on it, for for the morning.

f

An

support.

haggard. "I have some terrible news for you. I have asked you to come back here tonight because I have discovered some ter" rible facts. This report indicating the one he had last

CLARENCE

118

on my came from our This is what it says:

read, "was placed

think

it

DARROW By whom

can't say. I don't investigators but I can't be sure.

desk.

I

Last summer three men bought from the Hercules Powder Plant in San Francisco a quantity of 80% nitrogelatin, an explosive, claiming they were going to use it to blast boulders and tree stumps out of a wooded lot. One of these three men has been definitely identified by a Hercules

employee who sold the powder as James B. McNamanu three men stored the explosives in a wharf in San Francisco. The wharf owner identifies James McNamara as being one of the three men, without question.

The

He

put down the report "It continues with names of people who positively saw the three men and identified them on the streets of San Francisco at that time/' Joseph Scott spoke. "We all know that the prosecution has been holding as evidence a suitcase found next to the Times Building with some sticks of eighty percent nitrogela-

which were stamped with the label of the Hercules Powder Plant." For a little while the room was quiet with shock. Then, "The McNamaras are guilty!" Davis exploded. "I am afraid so," Darrow said. "There is another possi-

tin

of course. This whole thing

may be a frame-up. This have been report may deliberately slipped onto my desk to convince us that our case is lost so that we will go into court next week and be licked before we start. That's one bility,

possibility. There Steffens' efforts to

He told them of Lincoln Chandler and other influential persuade

is still

another."

people to drop the bombing and murder charge and let the McNamaras plead to a minor guilt of some kind. "Steffens says they

He

seemed eager

to

do something

like this."

is so weak paused. "Perhaps that they are afraid of us in court. Perhaps they are afraid of this whirlwind of have stirred public opinion

it is

because their case

they

up.

CLARENCE DARROW

119

They do not like the fact that Job Harriman is campaigning for

mayor and the working people are so aroused they might

vote for him."

Harriman was the only defense lawyer not present. He was out of the city for the night. "What do you think, Clarence?" Judge McNutt asked. Clarence's hands, as he lifted the report and put it back on his desk, were shaking. "I don't know! In my heart I believe they are guilty. I believe they never intended any loss of life; just the destruction of property. They could not

know

that the gas line

would explode. But

I

can't

be

sure!"

am sure of one

thing." Davis was emphatic. "If we go on with the trial we are beaten. The McNamaras will hang. These San Francisco witnesses, the purchase of the powder

"I

they will convict the two brothers as sure as I'm sitting here."

"Do you want me

to tell Steffens to go ahead with his Plead the McNamaras guilty, in exchange for bargaining? their life?" Darrow asked the question and then looked squarely at each one. Their faces reflected the distaste and dislike for this move, but one after another they nodded their heads.

our only chance to get out of this with honor/* Judge McNutt said. "It is our only chance to save the lives of our clients and that is our first responsibility." As they left, Darrow said one last thing: "We might as well make up our minds that if we go through with this, it will be misunderstood. There will be millions of people who will still believe the McNamaras are innocent and that we let them down. There will be others who will say we should have gone through with it, even if they were guilty, if only to show the world what pressures drive men like these two to such desperate acts/' Davis lingered for a moment behind the others. "Do you "It is

CLARENCE DARROW

120

want me There is

go with you to see the McNamaras tomorrow? still a chance they can prove their innocence." Neither man believed this. They had had a strange foreboding all through the past months; they had both been tormented because their clients had not been able or willing to

to produce concrete proof of their innocence. "No. Thank you. I'll go alone."

granted Darrow a special room where he could talk privately to the prisoners. The two men sat while Darrow told them of quietly, with unreadable faces,

The jailors had

the report and what it contained. Whether the facts were true or false could not be seen from their expressions. They

did not speak until Darrow told them of the decision: that they should plead guilty. An agreement would have already been made; they would not be throwing themselves on the

mercy of the Court; they would be given light sentences. Then John spoke. "We are innocent of murder. We have never done anything in our lives to deliberately hurt people. But, if we don't plead guilty, does that

will hang?

You

say

it

mean that James

was he who was identified by the

Hercules salesman?"

James McNamara protested,

fiercely, to his

brother, "It

not important about me!" He then said to Darrow, "Why should John be implicated in this? No one can say anything about him. We can prove he was not in San Francisco." is

Their lawyer looked helplessly from one to another, feeling ashamed of his role in the face of the tremendous love these two brothers felt for each other. "No one will hang. That will be the bargain. But this deal with Fredericks, the prosecuting attorney, is the only way I can be sure that James will not hang."

John spoke. "Then we accept." Darrow left them in greater bewilderment than

before.

Were they really innocent? Were they accepting the arrange-

CLARENCE

ment only because each cared

DARROW so

121

much and feared

so

much

for the other?

The next day was one of many secret conferences.

Steffens

met with his influential friends. All of the defense lawyers and Steffens revisited the prisoners. The final decision must be up to the McNamaras because now that the prosecution realized that the defense was seeking terms, the bargain was one that Barrow could hardly bring himself even to consider. The McNamaras would not hang but James must take a life sentence!

The two brothers argued fiercely. Not with the lawyers, but with themselves. John could not agree to any proposition that would give James a life sentence; James was for holding out until the prosecution agreed to release John, unconditionally. Darrow listened to

did he

feel

no horror

them and wondered

at himself.

at the thought that these

two

Why

men

James, almost certainly had been responsible for the death of so many men inside the Times Building? It wasn't just their deep, abiding faith and love in each other. The principle that had driven such men to dynamiting and bombing wrong as it was was their sense of brotherhood for workingmen. They believed they were helping other

workingmen by destroying the property press labor. They had not meant to kill.

The

confession that James

McNamara

of those

finally

who

op-

wrote said

much: There had been a labor parade in Los Angeles. The an edipolice had used sticks and clubs on the marchers. In torial in the Los Angeles Times the next day the parade, the workingmen, the trade unions had been treated with such scorn and such degrading words that James McNamara thought that Chandler should be taught a lesson. He had bought the nitrogelatin and planted it. It was a very small as

quantity;

by

itself it

could not possibly have killed anyone.

CLARENCE DARROW

122

was to have been only a token blast to warn Chandler, the owner of the Times, that labor had strength to fight back. Then the gas had exploded. Job Harriman, when he saw the confession, threw it on the floor. "I do not believe it. James is doing this only to save his brother from hanging. With the information you gave him in that report it was easy for him to concoct this It

nonsense." "I

am

feel as

afraid/'

you

do.

Darrow

said, "that millions are

going to

We are going to be unpopular men."

"Then why

are you doing this? Making this deal!" "Because I am not a labor leader!" Darrow exploded. "I have no responsibility to any union, even if the American Federation of Labor is paying my fee in this case. I am not a politician. I am a lawyer and a lawyer's first and only duty is

to his clients. I

am going to save

their lives!"

During these conferences the trial had begun. The first days were unimportant; they were given over only to the selection of a jury; there had been no actual moves in the trial, itself.

On the morning of December 1, 1911, a sudden wave of uneasy excitement rippled through the courthouse, traveling from group to group of reporters and bystanders and down the long line of those waiting to get into the courtroom when the doors opened. The news spread that the McNamara brothers were to appear that afternoon. This was unexpected.

The

not

the prosecution had not yet opened up its first guns of the attack and now the prisoners were coming into court! trial

officially

begun

The buzz of questions swept the hall. Reporters rushed to the telephones to alert their city desks that something was about to break. At two

o'clock the entire courtroom was filled and quiet. Bordwell entered. Everything was as it should be for Judge

CLARENCE

D ARROW

123

the opening day of court

except for the appearance of those two men sitting stiffly by Barrow's side, their two shoulders pressed close together the two brothers. Clarence got to his feet and stepped to the front of the

room, his back to the audience, looking up into Judge Bordwell's stern face. Darrow began to speak. His voice foiled. He motioned to Le Compte Davis to step up beside him. It was Davis who addressed the Judge: "May it please the Court, our clients, James and John McNamara, wish to change their plea from not guilty to guilty/'

There was a gasp

No!" from the mostly union men. Reporters dashed from the room. Everyone else sat in complete disbelief. It could not be happening. For nearly a year the crusade to free these innocent men had occupied the thoughts and the

audience

of shock; cries of "No!

who were

Now they were betrayed! who had the night Bordwell gavel banged. Judge before been informed of the agreement between prosecution and defense and agreed to it set Election Day as the day he would pronounce sentence. Court was adjourned. At that, there was a roar of sound angry, confused, inhearts of all trade unionists.

The

credulous, outraged and the weight of it hit Darrow in the face as he walked down the aisle. Men grabbed for his sleeve.

stop

They

this.

flung questions at him; they begged

Why

was he doing

this?

him

to

The McNamaras were

being framed!

Darrow had to move slowly because of the hands that clutched at him. He could only shake his head at the questions. He could not speak. By the time he had forced his way to the courtroom steps the news had traveled faster than

An enormous crowd was waiting for Trnn. It was a seething mob whose hatred was directed toward that one he had.

stooping, shambling figure of Darrow. Darrow the Judasl The man who had sold out labor and the McNamaras!

CLARENCE DARROW

124

their accusations at him, the anger growing and building until it was a solid roar of sound. Someone tore off a "Free the McNamaras" button and threw it at

They hurled

Darrow. It hit his face. Others followed suit and soon there was a hailstorm of buttons pelting at his face and his body. Someone struck at him with a fist and he lurched down the steps.

He felt a hand on his arm and tried to shake it off. Mr. Darrow. You come with me." He looked up. It was Billy CavBoise. the stonecutter from anaugh, "I'll get you out of this." And Billy thrust his own powerful shoulders so forcefully into the crowd that a space was cleared and the two men walked free. "We'd better run for it, Mr. Darrow."

"Take

it easy,

He knew

that voice!

"I won't run."

They made

their way, inch

by inch, to the

streetcar.

At home Ruby met them in great fright. She had heard a rumor of a riot at the courthouse; when she learned the truth she was indignant. "A lynch mob! Hoodlums! They might have hurt you badly." "They have a right to be angry. They have a right to feel betrayed," Clarence told her, sadly. "It was the situation not me that did it to them, but I am a handy target. The people in that crowd know that there is a bigger issue in this case than the guilt or innocence of the two men. What drove the

McNamaras

to such desperation as dynamiting?

What

them made them believe they could strike back in this way? That's what the labor unions hoped this trial would reveal. Now there won't be any trial. Chandler and the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association of Los Angeles will be riding high; none of their crimes will be dragged out into the light. They will see to it, now, that union organization is smashed in this city. For many years, cruelties to

at least."

CLARENCE

DARROW

125

He was weary to the bone. But before he could rest, there was the puzzle of Billy Cavanaugh. "How did you happen to be there, just at the right moment? And how can I thank you?" "Don't. I just had a kind of feeling, Mr. Darrow, that you were in trouble. I don't know what it was; something

seemed to tell me to get on the and look after you."

train

and come down here

am

so grateful." Darrow lay in the darkened

"I

bedroom but he could not be This would the of many, many sleepless first sleep. when he would toss and turn, restless and unhappy, nights I do the Did wondering. right thing? Are they guilty? Could I have saved them? Should the trial have gone on? Have I hurt the very people the working men and women I most want to help? But when Job Harriman and Gompers and others accused him of selling them out, he turned belligerent. "You've got your jobs," he told them, rudely, "and I've got mine. I'm a lawyer. I don't care about anything but saving the necks of the McNamaras from hanging." Judge Bordwell sentenced the McNamaras: James to life and John to fifteen years. With that sentence Darrow's career as a labor lawyer was virtually at an end. But there were even worse things awaiting him. He had thought, when he stood on the courthouse steps, manhandled by the mob, that he had reached the lowest depths of defeat and anguish. There was worse to come. During the preparations for the trial he had allowed Bert Franklin, the former Los Angeles detective, to take over the entire questioning and investigation of the jurors. He knew nothing of Franklin; he had had to take the man on the

word of

One

a friend.

day, late in

November,

just as the trial

was about to

CLARENCE DARROW

126

begin with the selection of the jury, Darrow had walked out of the courthouse during the noon lunch period for a breath of fresh

air.

He had

strolled

down Third

Street.

He saw

Franklin on the other side and crossed leisurely over to catch up with him.

two Just as he approached Franklin and started to speak, him. city detectives, Browne and Campbell, stopped arrest." under "Don't talk to this man, Mr. Darrow. He's Franklin was charged with trying to bribe a juror to testify falsely for

the defense.

The charge of bribery on Franklin's part was coming up The Darrows were anxious to leave for Chicago now that the McNamara case was over, but they couldn't. Darrow wondered about Bert Franklin. He couldn't believe a man who had been a detective for many years, in the pay

in court.

of the district attorney, could have been such a stupid fool. He had had no reason to bribe this juror. Franklin was not

a union man; he was not guided by devotion to a cause nor by any great affection for Darrow. It could not have been misguided loyalty that he would such a thing just because he might have thought it would win the case for the defense. "It's much more likely," Lincoln Steffens argued, "that Franklin has been in the pay of the other side, all along; that he did this, knowing he would be caught, to discredit the defense."

"And," Clarence agreed, "was probably well paid for it. grateful and pay him later." Franklin's charge was heard in court in January. He pleaded guilty and was fined $4,000. Immediately the Dis-

Or hoped somebody would be

Attorney, Fredericks, called for a meeting of the Grand Jury. Franklin was to testify to them how it happened he trict

bribed the juror. On January twenty-ninth, Clarence Darrow was arrested on two charges of conspiracy one, of persuading Franklin

CLARENCE DARROW to lie

when

first

arrested,

127

and the second, of conspiracy to

bribe the juror.

That evening the small cottage of the Darrows was beseiged by reporters. Finally the door opened and Clarence walked out, his arm linked in Ruby's. On his other side was Earl Rogers, a Los Angeles attorney who had agreed to defend him, "I have a statement I wish to read to you." This was not the courtroom voice that had made Darrow famous. He spoke as if he, himself, were at a great distance; mechanically, without expression. "I am innocent of the charges that have been brought against me, and I hope that you will withhold judgment until I am given an opportunity to establish that fact. The charges that have been brought against

me

are too serious to treat lightly. Doubtless the was evidence to

District Attorney's office believes that there

warrant the advice that it gave the Grand Jury, but in the end it will be shown that grave error and injustice has been perpetrated." The reporters left, puzzled. Where was the fore, the passion, the scorn and fury they had expected from him? Could it be true that Darrow was guilty?

CHAPTER

8

Darrow was sick at heart. Only two hours before, his very good friend Lincoln Steffens had cautiously asked if it was

And if Steffens could even for a moment think such a think of him, then what were others believing? Lincoln apologized. But the harm was done. In the deepest core of Darrow's touchy pride he had been wounded. He had defended many men from injustice. He had never, in his wildest imagination, believed the time would

true!

come when he would be arrested and his own honor, his integrity, his honesty would be in question. The headlines of newspapers were blazing the bribery and conspiracy charges all over the country; his enemies would make much of his misfortunes.

In his own private hell he thought of the many times he scornfully called men "fools" who allowed themselves to be caught up in legal disasters. Sympathy, yes he had this for the unfortunate criminals who could not help them-

had

But how many times had his sarcastic tongue ripped into intelligent, well-meaning citizens who had unwittingly wandered into trouble? Could his friends really believe he was guilty of doing selves.

such a stupid, senseless, petty, unreasonable thing as trying to bribe a juror in such a headline-spotlighted case as the McNamara one? If they didn't believe his honesty over all 128

CLARENCE DARROW

129

these years, could they not credit his common sense? Friends did fall away. Letters came denouncing him,

others gleeful that he was getting what ing been a Judas to the McNamaras.

and he deserved for hav-

was heartbreaking for Ruby to watch the self-confidence that Clarence had always possessed, to a degree almost arrogant, fall away from him. She hated to see the shrinking way in which he walked, the new lines in his face and the way the flesh thinned so that the bones showed through and the skin around his jaw was slack and loose. He would It

hardly talk to her. In the evenings Billy Cavanaugh gave him alcohol rubs; then he would sit for a while, holding Ruby's hand, trying to sleep. The days, he helped Rogers prepare for the trial. This was their second year in Los Angeles. All their

money was

gone, to pay Rogers' fee and the expenses of the

case.

Ruby took a tiny cottage close to the ocean. Each day, as the trial began, she dressed in her one still-pretty blue dress and walked with Clarence to the streetcar. They rode in But she had been up before breakfast, cleaning the house and cooking, washing Clarence's silk shirts and her blue dress, ironing them so they would be fresh and clean. The early days of the trial were not dramatic. Rogers was a clever lawyer and did a great deal of damage to Franklin's other story, when he put him into the witness chair. The confutremendous the to added witnesses only prosecution sion. The jurors were obviously bewildered. Was Darrow silence to the courtroom.

The jury, as well as everyone else in the courtroom, could not keep their eyes off the figure of the prisoner, forward. sitting hunched, motionless, his head dropped The Lion of the Courts was stricken. Tamed.

guilty?

was the day before Rogers was to make the final plea for his client. Court was recessed, early. Darrow and Rogers It

CLARENCE DARROW

130

went to the latter's office to discuss a few matters. A man was waiting for them George Bissett. Many years before Darrow had defended George Bissett on a murder charge. Darrow had investigated, found he had actually shot in self-defense and had won Bissett's freedom. This was the man George Bissett who was waiting that day outside the office. He had hitchhiked his way across the country to get there.

"What can I do himself: What can

for you, George?" Clarence thought to I do for any man, now? I cannot even

help myself.

what / can do for you, Mr. Darrow." Bissett spoke simply but there was no question he meant what he said. "These are evil men who are lying about you. I owe you my life. Now I am going to kill them for you." "What!" Bissett repeated it. "You and I used to talk, Mr. Darrow. You know what I wanted to do something to help other people. I wanted to start a newspaper, but I didn't have any money nor education. This is something I can do. They "It's

it's

aren't going to put you in jail." Bissett's incredible offer seemed to shock

Darrow out of a trance he had been in for months. That this simple, uneducated man could seriously be offering to lay down his life for It was almost too much to believe. He turned away to hide the tears. Rogers put a telegram into his hand. "This just came for !

you." Clarence opened

it

and read:

"I hear that you have spent most of your life defending for nothing and that you are now broke and facing trial. I will let you have all the money you need for the case. now sending draft for one thousand dollars/'

men

Am

Signed-

Frederick D. Gardner, Louis, Missouri.

St.

CLARENCE

D ARROW

131

Darrow knew no one by the name o Gardner. The sender of the telegram was a complete stranger to him. Yet like a miracle two men had put out their hands to rescue him.

One offered the money he so badly needed;

the other would

go to the electric chair for him. Clarence went home. He asked Ruby for the letters that had poured in by the thousands from friends and acquaint-

He studied them. was hours before he finally said to Ruby, "I am ashamed. I thought I was deserted. I had read these before,

ances. It

searching for guilty.

word

And now I

in

them

see that

that people did not believe me was never said in these letters

it

because they never for one minute believed I was; they would not insult me by even suggesting it."

She put her arm around

was the others that came first. The attacks and the insults. You were raw from them and you were looking for an assurance from friends that they had no idea you needed." his shoulders. "It

The next day, when court opened in the morning, there was a surprise. It was not to be Earl Rogers who would make the plea to the jury; it was Clarence Darrow who got to his and said: "Gentlemen of the

feet

jury"

The people in that room were caught in mixed emotions: surprise, admiration

low and

but mostly

pity.

Barrow's voice was

The judge

leaned forward, a question in faltering. his face; he looked inquiringly at Rogers who made a helpless, what-can-I-do-about-it gesture with his hands.

"Gentlemen of the jury an experience like this has never come to me before," Darrow swallowed and then went on, "and of course I cannot say how I will get along with I have been looking into the penitentiary for six or it seven months and now I am waiting for you twelve men to say whether I shall go there or not/'

CLARENCE DARROW

132

His voice gained in strength. His whole body straightened. He moved slightly, a little closer to the jury.

gentlemen of the jury? What is having sought to bribe a because I have been trial man named Lockwood. I am on a lover of the poor, a friend of the oppressed, because I have stood by labor all these years, and have brought down on my head the wrath of the criminal interests of this country ... that is the reason I am here and that is the reason I have been pursued by as cruel a gang that has ever followed a man."

"What am

it all

I

about? I

The

on

am

trial for,

not on

trial for

had risen to a volume of righteous had only been sleeping; he was aroused anger. The Lion now and fighting. In that courtroom mouths fell open; they could not have believed that the shambling wreck they had seen shuffling into the courtroom every day could be this revitalized, passionately declaiming, unafraid man who was striding up and down with the full vigor of youth. And those who had never seen Darrow perform now realized just where his true genius lay. They saw him as the people of Boise and the people of Chicago and elsewhere had seen and marveled speak without notes for hours, organizing the confused mass of testimony from over twenty witnesses under both examination and cross-examination and make a clear, concise, simple, understandable story out of what was the truth, a story that could be listened to and followed distinctly. They had thought, when he sat so listlessly at the defense table, that he wasn't even hearing anything that had been said by witnesses or the lawyers. Actually he had scarcely listened, but in the center of his brain a trained, disciplined mind had taken over in spite of himself and sorted and retained and probed and organized.

He

Lion's voice

took the jury over every step of Franklin's testimony.

CLARENCE DARROW

He

tore

fabric of

it

into little pieces. the lie it was.

He showed

133 the whole rotten

it for

And over and over again he hammered home that only because he had taken the defense of the McNamaras was he now fighting for

own

freedom. "I have committed one crime for which I cannot be forgiven I have stood for the weak and the poor. I have lived

my life and

I

and the poor

his

have fought my battles, not against the weak anybody can do that but against power,

injustice, against oppression.

would have walked from Chicago across the Rocky ... to lay my hand on the shoulder of James B. McNamara and tell him not to place the dynamite under the Times Building. I have loved peace all my life. I believe that love does more than hatred. I believe that both sides "I

Mountains

have gone about the settlement of these difficulties in the wrong way. Men are not perfect; they had an imperfect origin and they are imperfect today, and the long struggle of the human race from darkness to comparative civilization has been filled with clash and discord and murder and war and violence and wrong but ever we are going onward

and upward to the sunshine where the hatred, war, and violence of the world will disappear/'

He

was not begging for compassion. on those who had framed him:

cruelty

He turned his

scorn

inclination and habit I am about the world who could have possibly undertaken jury bribing. Mine was a position which needed to be If you think I would pick out guarded most carefully a place half a block from my office and send a man with money in his hand in broad daylight to go down on the street corner to pass four thousand dollars why, find me guilty. I certainly belong in an institution/' Darrow walked back to the defense table. He took off his coat. Now, as he stood once more before the jury, he

"By all my training,

last

person in

all this

.

. .

CLARENCE DARROW

134

was at ease. His thumbs were hooked inside his suspenders; he rocked back and forth slightly. His voice was a mighty trumpet. are you ready, gentlemen, in this day and generation, to take away the name and liberty of a human being upon ".

.

.

the testimony of rogues, informers, crooks, vagabonds, immunity hunters and detectives? If so, I don't want to live; I don't

want

to live in a

world where such

the undoing of an American citizen!" At the press table a newspaper reporter

men

can cause

who had been

cynically offering bets all through the trial that Darrow would go to jail and that he was a finished, broken man,

passed a note to a rival reporter. The note read: "I'll bet ten to one

Not

Guilty!"

The

jury retired for deliberations at nine-twenty in the morning. At nine-fifty they came back.

Judge Hutton frowned at their smiling, beaming faces. This was unseemly in so solemn an occasion. "Your pleasure?" he asked. "Nox GUILTY!" the foreman shouted it, happily, and, ignoring the Judge's displeasure and the banging of the gavel, stretched out his hand in friendship to Darrow. Then there \vas pandemonium. Jurors and audience, alike, rushed over to embrace him; they had to wait for a second while he turned to kiss Ruby. People wept and shouted, men pounded him on the back, and those who could not touch

him shouted

their congratulations.

Judge Hutton

hastily retired.

The

scene was

much

too

undignified for him to countenance with his presence. Ruby stood a little aside. Her heart was almost too full.

She had seen a double triumph: his acquittal and the rebirth of the greatness of this man she loved. In all those terrible months her courage and her faith in him had never weakened, yet there had been moments when she had won-

CLARENCE DARROW dered

come

On up

He

how

it

was

all

135

going to come out, when would he

to himself.

the journey back to Chicago where they were to pick

their lives once more, she sensed a change in Clarence. had regained all his old confident cocksureness; he was

he teased her, provoked her into arguments as o old. But there was a difference. Humble he would never be; sweet-tempered, modest, saintly, soft-spoken, meek and mild never! This was not Clarence Darrow. He had acquired, though, a new understanding and tolerance and sympathy for his fellowman for all men. Never again would he claim that intelligent people had only themselves to blame for their troubles. Once he had had pity only for the poor or the ignorant; now he had it for everyone. With one exception he could not tolerate stupidity. If anything, he was to grow more caustic, more sarcastic, more impatient of people who put blinders on their eyes, and used their fine brains only to fool themselves and others. They were absolutely penniless when they reached home. Once again Ruby was to clean their nine-room apartment by herself, cook their meals, wash and iron their clothes and redye the carpet. And Clarence was out of work. He had left his old firm when he went to Los Angeles because the defender of the McNamaras was only a liability to other gay;

lawyers.

He was offered a chance to lecture, for a fee. He agreed without hesitation. They needed money badly. "If anyone comes to hear me," he told Ruby, "it will be out of curiosity. They'll come to see that crazy Darrow who was almost a jailbird." She was horrified. "I won't have them staring at you, as if you're some kind of an exhibit in a circus!" "Never mind. I have a surprise for them. You wait and see." He grinned with huge enjoyment at the joke he was planning to play on the people of Chicago.

CLARENCE DARROW

136

he rose to speak at the Garrick Theatre it was to a packed hall. He thought to himself: all of them hoping to hear me thunder against the evil forces that arrested me, or "inside" about the give them some juicy gossip from the McNamaras. He rose to his feet and began to speak. The topic of his speech was the poetry of Walt Whitman. Not law. Not his cases. Not the McNamaras. Not himself. Poetry! He spoke for well over an hour and every spectator stayed quiet in his seat. At the end of the speech there was an enthusiastic ovation. Darrow was floored. His joke had backfired. The audience had loved what he was saying. Could it be that he still had the power to interest an audience? Could it be that he, Clarence Barrow, was still a figure of respect?

When

He accepted more lecture dates. People lined up at the doors for hours before his performance to be sure to get tickets.

And the

one day there came to his home a young lawyer by of Peter Sissman. In earlier days Darrow had

name

helped Sissman to get started in his legal practice. Now Sissman was to repay his debt. "I want you to come into my law office, Clarence. A friend of mine,

a

new

named

firm.

Bailey,

and myself are thinking of

We need you/'

starting

"Don't be ridiculous," Darrow answered. "I would be nothing but a millstone round your necks. I would drive clients away. My name on your office door would be a scandal."

"We don't think so. If we're willing to take a chance, why won't you?"

The argument went on all evening. As Sissman was leaving he confided to Ruby, "We've got him back into law. Lecturing is all right but it's a waste of his experience and his talents. He doesn't realize it but there are still no lawyers in this country to rival him. to get

CLARENCE DARROW

He is the great man of the

137

Oh, there are others the fine points of law. There are great teachers of law and great judges, but no one can equal Clarence in a battle. People need him, Mrs. Darrow." She hesitated. Being a lawyer had meant so much pain and misery and torment! Then she said, "I think you are right. He is missing something that he needs. A fighter needs an arena, not a lecture platform." Ruby added her persuasions to Sissman's. And so did Paul when he came to Chicago on a visit, bringing his lovely wife, Lillian, and their baby, Mary. Paul's letters to his father all during his trial had been a constant support; Clarence knew that even though they were so unlike and trial courts.

who know more about

even though Paul was a highly respected businessman of Greeley, Colorado his affection and high regard for his father had never wavered. "Do it! Go back into practice/* Paul urged him.

And so, hesitating and doubtful, reluctant that the public should have the opportunity to brand him a has-been at fifty-seven years of age, Clarence added his name to the firm Darrow, Sissman and Bailey. For months there were no clients asking for Darrow. He brought in no business at all. Gradually a few cases came his way, but at the end of the year when Sissman figured out his earnings he found that the firm had made a few hundred dollars less than he had made the year before entirely

on

his

own.

The new year started much the same. Darrow was lecturing now and then; when he would return to the office he would come ambling into Sissman's office and quietly ask, "Anything for me to do?" Sissman would be embarrassed. He could not ask Clarence Darrow to do the work of a clerk. Then, suddenly, cases for Darrow began to trickle in; grew in quick leaps to a flood. There was more business than he could handle. People were damoring for him; they

CLARENCE

138

wanted no one

else to

D ARROW they were they were the

be their defense lawyer

accused, or their lawyer to carry the attack plaintiff, making the complaint.

Bailey asked Sissman,

if

if

"What do you suppose happened

so suddenly?" "Success/' Peter Sissman

was triumphant "You just

haven't been noticing. Darrow has been winning his cases, no matter how small and unimportant they seem to be. Word like that gets around."

knew his secret. How he does it." "You should know. Watch him. He looks as

"I wish I

but that drawling voice of his and that

if

he

easy, slow

is

lazy

way he

just a pose. Part of his secret is how hard he works. Before a case he has read everything, studied everything, organized and thought it through. He leaves nothing to

moves

is

chance.

And he

does this whether

it

is

a case involving

millions of dollars, murder or other crimes as he does if it's a case for recovering a fifty-dollar payment that is due

workman for wages. Or a woman who got slapped by a neighbor. Or a houseowner who thinks he is paying ten dollars too much property tax. The rest of his secret is that a

he can convince the jury that if they were in his client's shoes they would feel and think and act just as that client did."

"That's the part I don't understand. I don't see how he able to persuade twelve very different people on a jury that their sympathies are with his client."

is

Sissman knew the answer. "Because he feels it, himself. never stands apart from his client. Whatever suffering

He

the prisoner he ence.

Whatever

is it

defending has gone through, so has Clarwas that drove him to commit a crime,

Clarence can understand.

he

is

that someone. This

Though some

When he is pleading for someone, not an act. He really feels it."

is

of Barrow's cases were civil cases,

most

CLARENCE DARROW

139

were criminal. It was the people in the very worst of trouble who turned to him. For the second time, life was quiet and good for Ruby and Clarence. Like any other lawyer, he went to his office in the mornings and came home at night for dinner. Evenings were spent with friends or at a lecture appearance. Their apartment was once again a center for intellectual gatherings which had a surprising way, under Clarence's influence, of turning into gay and boisterous parties. There were no big headline cases. America was at war. 1917 and the attention of the country was centered on the war in Europe. Darrow had always been a pacifist; now he made a characteristic switch. He was enraged at Germany and Austria's attack on their weaker neighbors. He made a speech criticizing President Wilson for being so slow in getting America into the war. When someone from the floor objected and reminded him of his former pacifist statements, Darrow replied with good humor: "I discovered that pacifism is probably a good doctrine in time of peace, but of

no value in wartime."

CHAPTER

i a

9

a

The war was over.

In Russia there had been a revolution. Radicals, socialists, anarchists, all kinds of social reformists hailed this revolution as a tremendous step forward, but their enthusiasm was not shared by others, and was distrusted and feared by a few. kind of panic upset the common sense of these few. They looked upon these enthusiastic radicals though so tiny in number as possible breeders of a similar revolution

Then it was

1918.

A

in the United States. Get rid of them Clap them in jail! ! let them talk or write or make speeches without of due law, thousands Entirely illegally, process of radicals were thrown into jails. Their families had no idea of where they were or what had happened to them. I

Don't

Books were burned. Newspapers were destroyed. As Darlater, about this period: "The world could not pass through the welter of hate and destruction of life and property of the four years of war without bringing dire results Men were arrested, indicted and convicted and sent to prison, all over the United

row wrote,

States for daring to express their opinions by a speech or by the press. Any so-called radicalism was unpatriotic because

contrary to the views of the exploiting class." Congress passed the Overthrow Act, which

140

made

it

un-

CLARENCE DAKROW

141

lawful for any person "openly to advocate by word of mouth or writing the reformation or overthrow by violence

or any other unlawful means of the representative form of now secured to the citizens of the United government " States

When Clarence read this he went into a towering rage. "This country was founded on an 'overthrow of government by violence!' And this law is so loose it could imprison almost anyone who said a word in opposition to any government policy listen to this! 'or any other unlawful means/ Who is to decide what is an unlawful means? Mr. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, I suppose/' Mr. Mitchell Palmer did set out to enforce the act. He did

it

by means of midnight

terror raids, scooping

up

citi-

out of their homes and beds and throwing them into prisons, incommunicado. His raids have come down in history as the zens

or, rather, especially the foreign-born

infamous Palmer Raids.

men and women came to Clarence Darrow. men and women came to him. "Help us! this must Angy Frightened

be stopped," they demanded.

Communist Labor Party were Darrow agreed to take their case. He wanted this particular case just because he knew that it was the most unpopular. There was no use getting a few individuals out of jail on the grounds they were there because of mistaken identity; he wanted to strike at the heart of the Overthrow Act. He had small chance of winning. Public opinion was Twelve members

of the

indicted in Rockford.

inflamed against the twelve Communists. This was one time Clarence was not selecting his words to appeal to the jury. He was aiming at the appeal to the Supreme Court. The twelve were convicted. But Darrow's speech to the jury was printed in the newsthe heads papers. This was what he wanted: to appeal over

CLARENCE DARROW

142 of a timid jury,

cowed by the weight and importance of the

Attorney General of the United ple of America.

Over the

States, directly to the

peo-

breakfast tables millions of Americans read his

words: "I am engaged in the difficult task of trying to preserve a Constitution instead of destroying it, and I am seeking to save for the people of this country such liberties as they have left. wiggled along for a hundred and fifty years

We

without this Espionage Law, and we did pretty well. Where did it come from? It came from the people who would strangle criticism; it came from the people who would place their limits upon your brain and mine, and if we give them their

in this world, every man, if he would be safe, should wear a padlock on his lips and only take it off to feed himself and lock it up after he gets through "I shall not argue to you whether the defendants' ideas are right or wrong. How do you settle that your opinions are right 'or wrong? There's nothing to measure them by; I have done the best that I could through many years to search for the truth. Sometimes I thought I had found it; and then again I thought I had lost it. "I know the humblest and meanest man who lives; I know that the idealist and the silliest man who lives, should have his say; I know that he ought to speak his mind; and I know that the Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and the humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the greatest and the strongest in the land." Over the breakfast tables millions of Americans read this and thought about this and some were ashamed that they had once approved of the Palmer Raids and still others nodded to themselves in quiet satisfaction. Sanity was coming back to America. The Supreme Court of Illinois upheld the verdict of

way

.

.

.

CLARENCE DARROW

14$

but Justice Orrin Carter wrote his own opinion and disagreed. This, too, was printed in the newspapers. It was like a large bucket of water thrown on the fire. The panic subsided. The Palmer Raids died out in shame. The Govguilty,

ernor of

Illinois

The name

of

Communist leaders. Darrow leaped back into national and in-

pardoned

all

of the

ternational fame, "It's a fine point," Sissinan wondered, "whether he just seems to attract the big and sensational and important cases or whether any case Clarence Darrow takes automatically

becomes big and sensational/' Not all of his wins were due to his own talents. Sometimes he had the breaks. There was one case of a son of a state examiner who had been arrested on the charge of selling, secretly, to students, the questions to the State Dental examinations so they would know what questions to prepare for in order to pass

and become

dentists.

Student after student was placed on the witness stand by the prosecution and each one testified, yes, he had bought

The defense table where Darrow sat with the young prisoner was enveloped with gloom. The and paid for the

questions.

defense would surely lose. Then came the surprise witness.

The prosecution called a student, sure that this last witness for their side would tie up

victory for

them in a

neat, pretty package.

"And did you buy the questions from

the prisoner sitting

over there?"

"Well

"

the student stammered.

The prosecuting attorney frowned. Then he thundered at the witness:

you signed a confession to that effect?" The student, suddenly and furiously angry, blurted out: "Yes, I confessed. I was routed out of bed at midnight, taken down to a dark jail and thrown in with two thugs who, I was "Isn't it true that

CLARENCE DARROW

144

were policemen. They pushed me around and threatened me and abused me for hours, until I would have confessed to anything just to get away from them." This changed everything. Darrow was once more back in the fight and now he had something to fight with. Verdict: told,

Not

Guilty.

By this time,

the firm of

Darrow and Sissman

(Bailey

had

dropped out of the firm) was making big money. Clarence Darrow had staged more than a comeback; he had gone on to become the best-known lawyer in the United States. In 1924 there came a case which he would very much have liked not to take. Because of his principle that every man no matter how bad is entitled to a fair trial, he was forced to take

it.

was a horrible, shocking crime: the murder of a young fourteen-year-old boy by two older teen-age boys, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold. It happened in Chicago. The families of both boys were wealthy and they offered Darrow huge sums in fees. It was not the money that decided him.* It was his conviction that youngsters who would do such a thing-were sick. They were mentally not responsible. He investigated the background of both boys and found that what he suspected was true. Both had too much money and not enough attention or love. Until they had found a friend in each other they had both been extremely lonely and neglected, looked after 'by servants. On the one hand their emotions were starved; on the other they possessed the power of unlimited wealth to order people about and deIt

mand any service they needed. The lack of love in their lives had

developed, in both, natures that did not understand pity, sympathy, tenderness or affection for anyone else. As students they had bril-

Then they stumbled across the teachings of Nietzsche and they dreamed of being like supermen, above liant records

CLARENCE DARROW

145

above other human values, above ordinary rules of They were unbalanced and neurotic. If Clarence Darrow had not become, in his more than

laws, life.

sixty years, almost completely impervious to criticism,

what

he received now would have shattered him. The announcement that he had taken the case was treated with contempt. "I never thought it of Clarence Darrow but I guess these lawyer fellows will do anything for money I" was the kindest thirty

said.

Anonymous

voices screamed insults at

him over

the tele-

phone. Letters came, stating that he had sold out every decent-thinking person by defending the two boys.

Hardest to answer were his friends. "How can you touch such a case? How can you let your name be identified with these murderers?" "They are just boys," Darrow would repeat over and over. "Just boys. Mentally they are mature; emotionally they are children."

still

He

was fighting a battle not

just in a

courtroom but

against almost all of his friends, his wannest supporters. The feeling ran so strong for punishment death for his two

young clients that at times he thought he could hardly stand up under the strain. Later, many years later, he was to confide: "No clients of mine have ever been put to death, and I felt that it would almost, if not quite, kill me if it. should ever happen. I felt that I would get a fair fee if I went into the case, but money

never influenced my stand one 'way or the other. I knew of no good reason for refusing, but I was sixty-seven years old and very weary. I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever " confronted man public opinion. But I went in He went in. And if he was sick at heart no one could tell it

He did more than his usual, thoughtful pretrial He read everything he could about psychology, about

then.

work.

CLARENCE DARROW

146

mind, about the queer quirks that otherwise sane minds could take under certain pressures. illnesses of the

He "I

decided to take the dangerous course. not going to plead them insanel"

am

office and had called a conference of the

staff.

He was in his He sat behind

his desk, leaning back in his swivel chair, slowly revolving it from side to side. He had developed a habit of late years

of looking at people over his eyeglasses looking, for all the world, as someone said, like a country schoolteacher. "I know that is what everyone expects us to do plead not

by reason of insanity." "But they are guilty. You can't plead that they are not. And what other defense do you have to fall back on, except guilty

insanity?" a junior member of the firm asked. "They aren't insane," he replied, bluntly. "I don't believe it and neither will a jury. Their school records are much too

any test you could give them would show how and keen their minds are. No but there is that area sharp of the mind that no one wants to acknowledge, that twilight zone between sanity and insanity. This is the tricky area that courts like to dodge the person who is normal ninety per cent of the time and completely abnormal for ten per cent. Or the person who lives all his life on a straight track and then runs off the rails for one brief second." "But the murder was planned. Premeditated." The staff who were ringing his desk, some seated, some standing, were troubled at Darrow's decision. Their faces showed it. They could not recall anyone defending and claiming their clients were not insane though they had done an insane act. As the trial began, the sensational aspects were splashed all over the newspapers. Darrow was treated with scorn. were People saying, "Money and a slick lawyer will fix Even Darrow's usual calmness deserted him; everything." over and over again he lost his temper in court when the brilliant;

CLARENCE DARROW

147

prosecuting attorney described the two boys as monsters entirely responsible for their acts. Yet his final plea was for love, for mercy, for humanity. When the prosecution had finally rested their case, Darrow pulled himself out of his seat, walked casually over to the space in front of the judge, leaned his weight for a moment with both hands flat on the bailiff's table, then slowly

who were

and began to speak. The defense had rea quested trial only before a judge, not a jury. Darrow had been afraid that even if eleven men were for acquittal, if

raised his head

there was one for conviction that one would poison the minds of the others. He was appealing to one man Judge Caverly. The spectators in the court were surprised. They had

heard him before in sharp clashes with his opposing attorney and they expected fireworks from him now. But his voice was soberly quiet and confidential; he was reasoning, not spellbinding.

"Crime," he said to the dignified, intelligent face of Caverly looking down at him, "has its cause. People tofind out to the cause. Scientists are are studying seeking day it; criminologists are investigating it, but we lawyers go on .

.

.

and on and on, punishing and hanging and thinking

that

by

general horror we can stamp out crime. "If a doctor were called on to treat typhoid fever he would probably try to find out what kind of milk or water the patient drank and perhaps dean out the well so that no one else could get typhoid from the same source. But if a lawyer were called

on

to treat a typhoid patient

he would give

him thirty days in jail, and then he would think that nobody else would ever dare to take typhoid/* Judge Caverly smiled slightly, if ruefully. His smile seemed to say he recognized and admitted the charge against his

own

profession.

Darrow went on:

"I have heard in the last six weeks noth-

CLARENCE DARROW

148

ing but the cry for blood. I have heard from the office of the state's attorney only ugly hate. I have seen a court urged almost to the point of threats to hang two boys, in the face of science, in the face of experience and all the better and more humane thought of the age." He spoke for a long time of the reasons for the crime; not the reasons on the surface, but those hidden below: the

combination of far too

much money,

far too little love, far

too brilliant minds that had been allowed to worship superman idols, far too little guidance and help pressures on their bursting adolescent emotional life that had suddenly been channeled into the wildness of destruction.

"I

know," Darrow

said,

and

this time

he turned his head

from Judge Caverly and looked out into the audience, "I know the future is with me and what I stand for here; not merely for the lives of these two unfortunate lads, but for all boys and all girls, for all of the young and, as far as possible,

am pleading for life, understanding, kindness and infinite mercy that considers all." charity, He walked over to where the two boys sat. They were for all of the old. I

Darrow came back to the judge. "You may hang these boys. But in doing

crying.

.

.

.

it

you

will

turn your face toward the past. In doing it you are making it harder for every other boy who in ignorance and darkness must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows." His voice trailed off into a silence that lasted one minute two minutes and still not a person moved in that room and the only sound was the sound of people sobbing and trying to conceal their tears. Clarence did not attempt to conceal his because they were real and from his heart. For two weeks after the trial was over Judge Caverly studied the testimony and considered his decision. On Sep-

tember

come

10,

when

that day,

it was announced that the decision would Darrow paced his office, up and down, up

CLARENCE DARROW and down.

An

unfortunate secretary

who opened

149 his door

got a savage snarl from him: "Get out!*'

Those two boys what if they had been his sons? What if Paul had done something like that? By the grace of good fortune, his former wife, Jessie, had been sweet and wise; she had not subjected young Paul to the usual miseries of a broken home; she had seen to it that he did not suffer the emotional upheaval of losing his father. But what if she hadn't? What of all the youngsters who were "groping their way through the maze" without the right kind of guidance and without love?

Unbeknown

to him, Clarence

identified himself with his clients.

Barrow had once again These two boys were like

his own; he could hardly stand the suspense of wondering whether they would die or live for their crime. A messenger from the Court arrived. Judge Caverly was

ready.

When

defense and prosecutor, prisoners, and audience, assembled once more in newspaper reporters the courtroom, Judge Caverly first paid his tribute to Dar-

they had

all,

row:

"The court is willing to recognize that the careful analysis made of the life history of the defendants and of their present mental, emotional and ethical condition has been of extreme interest and is a valuable contribution to criminology." He went on: "It would have been the path of"least resistance to impose the extreme penalty of the law Then it was not to be deathl Both boys received life sentences. trial victory for Darrow earned him a reputation of a being miracle worker. Another attorney once asked Peter Sissman, "How does he do it? Don't tell me it's just hard work; all lawyers work hard if they are any good at all." Sissman thought a while and then answered, "Darrow im-

This

CLARENCE

150

DARROW

presses on juries that it is not always easy to distinguish between right and wrong, particularly for historical purposes. His skepticism is so genuine that he imbues juries with it. He would defend anyone who was in trouble, even a capi-

against a labor racketeer. He is consistent in this human philosophy o defense, which forces him into contradictions in his sociological philosophy. He is not comtalist

mitted to any party or permanent creed; that

is

his greatness

and tragedy, both. That is why he is essentially a free man, not bound by doctrines; but it is also why he is inconsistent and sometimes antisocial ... he has no consistent life plan or design; he just drifts along from case to case and from year to year." His friend

had seen Clarence in court. "It seems to me is in a tight place he just shrugs his shoulders

that

when he

and

talks to the jury something like this: 'Maybe. Perhaps. can't tell. take a chance? Neither you nor I know.

You

Why

Give the accused the benefit of the doubt/

"And they

do/' said Sissman.

"

CHAPTER

10

For many years the little town of Dayton, Tennessee, had been just an ordinary, neat, trim, quiet little town that minded its own business, went its way undisturbed, and earned its living from the farms nearby. Behind the town Walden's Ridge of hills part of the Cumberland Mountains rose in gentle greenness, framing the town on the valley floor. For over a century Dayton had been a peaceful place.

But in the summer of 1925 everything changed. The Scopes Trial was like a tempest, whipping the quiet streets into a whirlpool of seething emotions, stirring up anger and fear and suspicion. In the center of the tempest were two Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. figures Bryan was already in Dayton. Wherever he walked the streets there was left in his wake a trail of fervent devotion and admiration and fanatic religious excitement. Darrow was still just a name a hated and despised name, the name of the "atheist" Chicago lawyer who was coming to Tennessee to fight Bryan, to duel words and the law with their champion. But Bryan would show him! the people said. They whispered it to each other; they shouted it aloud in churches. Bryan could wrestle with the Devil, himself, and win. Let Darrow come! 151

CLARENCE DARROW

152

On

a July day, the train pulled into the small, dusty station and a man and a woman alighted. The Darrows had arrived, unnoticed. Ruby looked around for a taxicab but

was too late: their fellow-passengers, mostly newspapermen, had rushed by them and grabbed every available it

vehicle.

"Never mind, Ruby," Clarence told

her, picking up two check the "Well baggage and walk. I'd like light portfolios. to walk. Get the feel of the town before we see the other

lawyers."

The

them but it was quiet They had not been compared for this. What was incredible, and Ruby prepared they saw gazed about her with shocked eyes and Clarence with eyes station

had seemed noisy

to

to the racket in the streets.

alight with curiosity, with the stirring of energy, the old call in his blood of the war cry and even, back in their

depths, a look of pity and sympathy for what he saw. "I thought this was to be a trial!" Ruby gasped. "It's like

a circus or a carnival or a religious revival meeting!" On every street banners were flying. Some stretched clear across from store to store. They screamed in huge letters:

READ YOUR BIBLE. GOD IS LOVE. YOU NEED GOD IN YOUR BUSINESS. WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? WE ARE NOT APES WE ARE MEN!

Scrawled in paint across whitewashed fences were warn"The Anti-Christ comes!" ings to "Fight the Devil" the Devil!" "Fight "That's me. I'm their idea of the Devil." Darrow chuckled, but it was a sad sound in his throat. He had no anger against the people who wrote the signs. In store windows hastily erected cages held bewildered monkeys swinging from rods, peering at passers-by over hand-lettered placards that read:

man is descended from monkeys.

"The

Is this

Evolutionists say

your grandfather?" streets than would

There were more people crowding the

CLARENCE DARROW

153

usually be seen in Chicago. It was hot and the men were in shirt sleeves and no coats, their wives in faded cotton dresses. Here and there little groups were arguing. Occasionally a

preacher could be seen in the center of such a group, exhorting them with wild, vehement gestures and ringing voice. As the Darrows rounded a corner they came upon one man down on his knees on the pavement. "Join with us, brother, the man cried. "Down on your 1

knees, sister,

and pray

'

for victory in the trial."

around him shouted "Amen" and

The crowd

everyone looked at the

Darrows.

Ruby would have

passed on but Clarence was getting

tired of walking and not knowing whether he was going in the right direction or not. "Thank you," he said, courteously,

the

"but

we

are in a hurry.

Can you

tell

us

how to

get to

Mansion House?"

At his words

them and question from the

there was a sudden silence around

ripple of sound that echoed his crowd down the street. People stared at them. Faces became closed and unfriendly.

a

little

outskirts of the

"Did you

say Mansion ting slowly to his feet.

House?" the preacher asked, get-

"Yes."

"Friend, you must not go there. It is the seat of the unholy. It is where the lawyers for young Scopes have gathered. would not hurt them but they They guard the place.

We

will destroy themselves, because they are against

God and

where Clarence Darrow is." Clarence hitched his portfolios under his arm and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Not yet he isn't. But he will be if Darrow." you'll just point out the way, I'm Clarence There was a murmur of shock and horror that could be

Bryan. That

is

heard all over the street. The preacher stared at Darrow in wild unbelief, as if Clarence grumbled later to Ruby he had expected the Chicago lawyer to have horns and a tail

154

CLARENCE

DARROW

and was disappointed to find him looking like an ordinary man. "It's Darrow!" the word traveled from person to person. Behind him he could hear a woman saying, loudly, "Oh, the poor, sweet, pretty lady. Ill pray for her soul, married to

him!"

Darrow could take any remarks made to him with perfect composure. But he resented anything said about Ruby; he turned and was about to answer when his wife laid her hand on his arm. "I'm sure," she said, kindly, "your prayers will not do my soul any harm and I thank you for it, even if I don't need " she waved and got the driver's atthem. Here's a taxi tention, tugged at Clarence's arm until he unwillingly followed her, still grumbling, and they were off down the street before the preacher could regain his tongue. " and you know, Clarence," Ruby told him with a wicked smile, "there have been times when I've wished someone would pray for my soul, married to a man who gets into as much trouble as you do."

As they made their slow way to the Mansion House they saw that on every corner boxes and stands had been thrown up to serve as bookstalls where hawkers cried in loud, raucous voices: "Here's where you get it! Read Mr. Bryan's books read about Hell and the High Schools read about how our children are being told lies about the Bible " And louder even than their voices were the shrill cries of the popcorn men and the peanut vendors and the men who sold balloons and candy and ice cream all mingled to-v gether with the sounds of people talking, arguing, the sounds of their shoes walking the pavements, the sounds of children laughing and crying, the sounds of preachers calling on their fellowmen to stand by Bryan in the trial that was so shortly to take place.

The

Scopes case had been a center of controversy for

CLARENCE DARROW months. It was headline news

155

over America. William Jennings Bryan the man who had once been a candidate for the presidency of the United States, who was called the all

silver-tongued orator, who had made the well-known "Cross of Gold" speech in which he had claimed that keeping the

nation on the gold standard was helping the rich against the poor was a man whose national prominence had begun to fade with the yeans. Only in Tennessee was he still a leader. It was here in Tennessee that he had prevailed upon the State Legislature to pass the Anti-Evolution Law. Bryan was a sincere man. But he was proud of the fact

he had read few books and that the Bible was the only book he had ever needed to read. He felt that Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species was a menace to young people. He wanted no teachings of biology, zoology, anthropology that

or natural sciences taught in the schools. He felt that these teachings of man evolving over millions of years from

amoeba

man, contradicted the Bible. William Jennings Bryan was not the one to let children be exposed to such heresy. He had the Anti-Evolution Law passed. to

Few people paid any attention to it until one day a young teacher in Dayton, named John T. Scopes, had gone to his principal and shown him a book Hunter's Civic Biology. Scopes had been teaching from this book for five years. He intended to go right on teaching from it, defying the AntiEvolution Law. The principal was confused. The book was a standard

textbook in all Tennessee schools yet now it violated a statute of the legislature. The principal could only say he supposed it should not be used, but he could suggest nothing to take its place. Young Scopes wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union; he had heard they considered the

Tennessee law to be unconstitutional and that their legal would defend anyone arrested under it. He decided, he

staff

154

CLARENCE DARROW

and was disappointed man.

to find

him

looking like an ordinary

"It's Darrow!" the word traveled from person to person. Behind him he could hear a woman saying, loudly, "Oh, the

poor, sweet, pretty lady. Ill pray for her soul, married to

him!"

Darrow could take any remarks made

to

him with

perfect

composure. But he resented anything said about Ruby; he turned and was about to answer when his wife laid her hand on his arm. "I'm sure/' she said, kindly, "your prayers will not do my soul any harm and I thank you for it, even if I don't need " them. Here's a taxi she waved and got the driver's attention, tugged at Clarence's arm until he unwillingly followed her, still grumbling, and they were off down the street before the preacher

"

could regain his tongue.

and you know, Clarence," Ruby told him with a wicked smile, "there have been times when I've wished someone would pray for my soul, married to a man who gets into as

much trouble as you do."

As they made their slow way to the Mansion House they saw that on every corner boxes and stands had been thrown up to serve as bookstalls where hawkers cried in loud, raucous voices: "Here's where you get it! Read Mr. Bryan's books read about Hell and the High Schools read about how our children are being told lies about the Bible " And louder even th^n their voices were the shrill cries of the popcorn men and the peanut vendors and the men who sold balloons and candy and ice cream all mingled together with the sounds of people talking, arguing, the sounds of their shoes walking the pavements, the sounds of children laughing and crying, the sounds of preachers calling on their fellowmen to stand by Bryan in the trial that was so shortly to take place. The Scopes case had been a center of controversy for

CLARENCE DARROW months. It was headline news

155

over America. William Jennings Bryan the man who had once been a candidate for the presidency of the United States, who was called the all

silver-tongued orator, who had made the well-known "Cross of Gold" speech in which he had claimed that keeping the

nation on the gold standard was helping the rich against the poor was a man whose national prominence had begun to fade with the years. Only in Tennessee was he still a leader. It was here in Tennessee that he had prevailed upon the State Legislature to pass the Anti-Evolution Law.

Bryan was a sincere man. But he was proud of the fact he had read few books and that the Bible was the only book he had ever needed to read. He felt that Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species was a menace to young people. He wanted no teachings of biology, zoology, anthropology that

or natural sciences taught in the schools. He felt that these teachings of man evolving over millions of years from

amoeba

man, contradicted the Bible. William Jennings Bryan was not the one to let children be exposed to such heresy. He had the Anti-Evolution Law passed. Few people paid any attention to it until one day a young teacher in Dayton, named John T. Scopes, had gone to his principal and shown him a book Hunter's Civic Biology. Scopes had been teaching from this book for five years. He intended to go right on teaching from it, defying the AntiEvolution Law. The principal was confused. The book was a standard textbook in all Tennessee schools yet now it violated a statute of the legislature. The principal could only say he supposed it should not be used, but he could suggest nothing to take its place. Young Scopes wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union; he had heard they considered the Tennessee law to be unconstitutional and that their legal staff would defend anyone arrested under it. He decided, he to

CLARENCE DAKROW

156

told them, to offer himself as a test case.

He would go on

teaching from the book.

Scopes was arrested. Now his trial was to be heard in just a few days. William Jennings Bryan was prosecuting, upholding die law he himself was responsible for. When the Darrows arrived at the Mansion House, taken by the defense as headquarters, they found the other defense lawyers already there: stocky, heavy-set Arthur Garfield

Hays of the American Civil Liberties Union; John Randolph Neal, a Tennessee lawyer possessed of great charm and dignity, tall and hazel-eyed; the sparkling, eloquent Dudley Field Malone; Doctor Charles F. Potter, a Unitarian minister.

author and the Blue with her of "Little husband, publisher, along Books." These Blue Books were very popular; they were little reprint volumes that dealt with almost every subject on earth that was popular, educational, cultural or sensational. Mrs. Haldeman-Julius knew that her millions of readers would want to know about this trial and these men. After luncheon she questioned them. Upon what would

They found

also Mrs. Haldeman-Julius, the

they base their defense of Scopes?

"Our

witnesses,"

Malone

said, "will

be both

scientists

We see this as a battle between science and superstition. Not against religion. We are not attacking the and churchmen.

it be Bryan's version which he insists that in Tennessee must believe. People interpret the everyone Bible in many different ways; some believe, as he does, in

Bible

the

unless

literal

ethical

truth of every word; others believe in

and

spiritual truths,

stories in it as

its

great

but do not accept some of the

anything but allegorical

or parables." me," grumbled Darrow, with an impudent look in his eye as if he hoped his words would shock her, "even atheists like me read the Bible. But Church and State were separated in America a long time ago. No one

"Even

atheists like

tales

CLARENCE

D ARROW

157

Bryan has the right to impose his reon American school children. What about the

religious fanatic like ligious tastes

kids

who

are Buddhists?

Mohammedans? Jews? And

if all

then what kind? Baptist? PresHuhl Catholic? Religion should be taught in byterian? churches. The schools have to be kept free for young minds of Tennessee

is

Christian

to inquire into everything to doubt everything to examine everything to decide for themselves what they will believe or not. That was my father's credo. I'll take that to

Bryan's bigotry and prejudice and narrow-mindedness, any day."

While he was talking she was ing him.

jotting

down

notes, describ-

tall, has a noble head, a kindly face, deepset eyes, big, broad, slightly-stooped shoulders; his face is like creased leather, scarred with the tension of battles. He has long-palmed hands and sensitive fingers. Hair slightly

gray.

".

.

.

An average man meeting him for the first time would

not be able to place him was he a farmer, a businessman, a he has so much of every man in him." professor, a worker? As she listened to the conference that developed during the next hour, she was actually absorbing impressions on two levels: even while she was intent on the issues of the she was also fascinated, captured by the contradictory personality of Clarence Darrow, himself.

case,

He had

he was an atheist. It would agnostic; he doubted the spiritual life, the existence of the soul, and immortality. But he doubted his own doubt. He could not be sure. On lecture platforms, as she knew from her newspaper reading and from what she had heard, he had many times debated religion with the leading religious figures of America. They would not have appeared with him if he had been nothing but a cynic and a scoffer. They said of him that he practiced what he did not preach: Doctor Shirley Case of the University of Chicago said, to bait her, that

be more exact to

call

him an

CLARENCE DARROW

158

had

said Clarence

Darrow himself was an argument

against the failure of Christianity, for he lived as close to the Golden Rule of Jesus as anyone he had ever known. This was the man Bryan and the people of Dayton were calling

and

an agent of the Devil, a heretic, a destroyer of morals

souls.

"Can't stand fools," Darrow was saying just then to his fellow lawyers, turning also to include Mrs, HaldemanJulius in the conversation. "Bryan was born with a brain and won't use it. Can't stand a fellow who boasts he won't read books. What's he afraid of? Afraid he'll learn something?"

As Mrs. Haldeman-Julius was leaving, Clarence walked want you to get the idea I look down on the people of Dayton or the people of Ten-

to the door with her, "I don't

much ignorance in I know small-town folk:

nessee. There's just as is

in small towns.

big cities as there they aren't mean.

And when

they get the chance, they're mighty quick to tell from right wrong. I'm counting on that." She arrived back at her hotel to find it besieged with people trying to get rooms. Dayton was bursting at the seams. Hundreds of newspapermen, photographers, editors, educators, scientists, politicians, and tourists had flocked in from the cities. From the back country of Tennessee had come local preachers, sometimes bringing their whole congregations with them to pray for the victory of Bryan. On Friday morning of July tenth, Darrow and the other lawyers arrived at the Rhea County Courthouse, a large brick building framed with a belfry, set in a lovely square with its small park of green lawn. Now the lawn could

A

hardly be seen for the crowds on every inch of it. path was made somehow for the defense attorneys to enter the building. There were no boos as they passed, but there were loud, fervent pleas from the crowd for them to pray for their own salvation cries of "Hallelujah!" and soft murmurs

CLARENCE

DARROW

159

"Amen" swept back even

into the densely packed streets. in one hand, a picture of Bryan in People clutched a Bible the other.

of

Like a profane chorus to this religious fervor came the popcorn vendors: "Getcher popcorn! getcher popcorn while it's hot! Gonna be a long day

strident voices of the

popcorn! peanuts!"

was already hot. The sun was beating down, unmercifully. Everyone was in shirt sleeves and Clarence envied It

them.

The courtroom was old. It had the musty, wood-rotten, old smell of a room too-long used, too many cigars smoked, too many spittoons overflowing. The windows were high and narrow and gave poor ventilation. At the defense table John Scopes was waiting. The defendant in the trial was frequently the most forgotten man there; all attention was centered on Darrow and on the short, stout picturesque figure of William Jennings Bryan, with his old-fashioned black frock coat and his broad-brimmed black hat.

The

He

judge's bench was barely raised from off the floor. sit, casually, among the rest of the main fig-

seemed to

ures of the drama.

The

section of the

room given over

to

spectators was packed; the space for lawyers and judge and jury was only less crowded. This courtroom was never meant to hold so many. In addition to the defense there were five legal men to assist Bryan; there were the twelve men of the jury; the clerk, bailiff and transcribing secretaries. And, oh, yes young John Scopes. So strong and colorful were the two opposing lawyers that people were apt to

forget the defendant.

Judge Raulston kept his dignity in spite of the turmoil. And turmoil it was. Right from the beginning. Barely had the Court been announced in session than Darrow was on his feet and strenuously objecting to the proceedings being opened each day by a prayer from a minister.

160

CLARENCE DARROW

"I don't object to the jury or anyone else praying in secret or in private," he shouted. "But I do object to the

turning of this courtroom into a meetinghouse in the trial this case.'* He knew the danger. It was one thing to science and in a if the atargue religion legal atmosphere;

o

mosphere were that of a church anything he would say would sound like blasphemy. To the audience even his objections seemed blasphemous. There was a sound of shocked amazement from the audience. Darrow turned from the Judge and stared, pugnaciously, at their horrified faces. The reporter for the Chattanooga Daily Times hurriedly scribbled in his notebook, to send to his paper: "The Chi-

cago lawyer knows he is a second Ajax defying the lightning; he knows that hot curses are being heaped upon his aged head and stooping shoulders, but he stands and has his say."

Judge Raulston was deeply religious. He refused to yield to Darrow's objection. From that moment on the battle was joined and never for one instant did the tension lessen nor was there the slight-

or peaceful moment. Bryan was the first to speak, in the preliminary statements. His beautiful speaking voice rolled the words out with fervent eloquence: "The trial uncovers the attack for est lull

a generation on revealed religion. A successful attack would destroy the Bible and with it revealed religion. If evolution wins, Christianity goes." Darrow replied, in his opening remarks: "Scopes

on

trial; civilization is

on

trial.

The

is

is

not

prosecution opening the doors for a reign of bigotry equal to anything in the Middle Ages. No man's belief will be safe, if they win." Defense lawyer John Neal argued that the Anti-Evolution Law was unconstitutional. Dudley Field Malone put into the record that the law the of Ten-

imposed upon

people

CLARENCE

D ARROW

161

nessee a particular religious opinion from a particular religious book what of the people of different faiths?

Were

they to be forced to believe in what Bryan called "revealed religion"? Did not the different Christian sects accept different revelations of the Bible?

And Darrow rose to speak again. His coat was already off. The spectators saw that his suspenders were purple against his white silk shirt. With a gesture grown habitual to him he hooked his thumbs underneath his suspenders, pulled them out as far as their elastic would stretch. He rocked back and forth on his heels as he spoke. "I know there are millions of people in the world who derive consolation in their times of trouble and solace in times of distress from the Bible. I would be pretty near the last one in the world to do anything to take it away. But the Bible is not one book. The Bible is made up of sixty-six books written over a period of about one thousand years, some of them very early and som6 of them compara.

tively late. It is

is

a

not a book of

.

.

book primarily of religion and morals. It science. Never was and was never meant

to be.

"This law says that

should be a criminal offense to teach in the public schools any account of the origin of man that is in conflict with the divine account that is in the Bible. It makes the Bible the yardstick to measure every man's intelligence and to measure every man's learning. Are your mathematics good? Is your philosophy good? Is your chemistry good? Every bit of knowledge that the mind has must be submitted to a religious test." it

now he had kept his tone and language mild. he changed. He lashed out at the Anti-Evolution Suddenly Law as "brazen and as bold an attempt to destroy learning as was ever made in the Middle Ages!" He looked at Bryan and declared that he was responsible for this "foolish and mischievous and wicked act."

Up

until

CLARENCE

162

D ARROW

to the crowd Spectators ran from the room to shout was on the courthouse lawn. Darrow saying scandalous things about the Bible and cried in horror.

The

and about Bryan. The crowd swayed

proceeded. For the

trial

first

few days the prosecu-

tion had the right to put on their witnesses first. They began with a fourteen-year-old boy who had been a student of

John

Scopes.

Young Howard Morgan said he had been taught in school that "The earth was once a hot, molten mass, too hot for plants or animal life to exist upon it; in the sea the earth there was a little

of one-celled organism formed, and this organism kept evolving until it got to be a pretty good-sized animal and then came on to be a land

cooled

off;

germ

kept on evolving, and from this was man, just another mammal." Bryan was disappointed the boy hadn't mentioned monkeys. He was disappointed that none of his witnesses said Scopes had taught them they were descended from mon-

animal, and

it

and that man was

Bryan wanted to be able to squash his opposition by simply saying, "So you think your grandfather was a mon-

keys.

key?"

When

it

came time

for the defense to put

on

their wit-

nesses they found that all their hard work before the trial was to go for nothing in fact, they found themselves with-

out a

case.

They had collected the best experts, over the whole United

of the

States, in the fields of biology, zoology, geology,

anthropology and had called on educators and clergymen to help on their side. But the first expert called to the witness stand was challenged by Bryan. " these people," he cried, "these atheists come in from the outside of the state and force upon the people of this state, upon the children, the taxpayers of this state, a doctrine refuting not only their belief in God but their belief

CLARENCE DARROW

163

Heaven, and takes from them every moral standard that the Bible gives us!" And each time he spoke there was applause and hosannas from the in a Savior

and a

belief in

audience*

and said, That Bible is not going to be driven out of this court by experts who come hundreds Bryan raised his hands in a

"The Bible

is

the

word

of

theatrical gesture

God

of miles to testify that they can reconcile evolution with its ancestor in the jungle, with man made by God in His "

image

And the spectators applauded. Judge Raulston ruled that the experts could not testify. In his opinion, neither religion nor evolution was on triaL

Only John Scopes. Darrow stood, furious and frustrated, glowering at both judge and audience. Never had he looked more like an old brought to bay by his enemies but holding in his caged muscles the strength still to fight. He asked for a recess. The defense must consider what they could possibly do under these circumstances. They had based their whole case on the testimony of the experts.

lion,

That night the lights burned late at the Mansion House. There was consternation and argument, defeat and anger in their conferences. The case was lost; further trial was hopeless. But as the night went on a plan was born.

The

next day Judge Raulston was forced to move court to the lawn. The unprecedented number of people who had crowded into the courtroom had so weakened the floor that there was danger of its collapse. Now the trial took on its final, bizarre appearance of a show. Instead of a few dozen people in the audience there were thousands listening. Rough benches were hurriedly assembled, a platform was built to hold the actual legal figures of judge, lawyers, defendant and jury. Down below, the townfolk and the visitors sat on the lawn, on camp

from inside

CLARENCE DARROW

164

or stood packed shoulder to shoulder. The trees surrounding the square were filled with small, squirming, chairs,

excited boys. "Is the defense ready to proceed, Mr. Darrow?" the asked.

"We

are,

Your Honor.

We call as our witness,

liam Jennings Bryan/' William Jennings Bryan Newspapermen dashed

Judge

Mr. Wil-

a witness for the defense?

Radio men, perched on trucks, alerted their far-off news desks. This was the most unexpected, the most unheard-of, daring, incredible move that they could have ever dreamed that Darrow would do. And why? Surely there was not one kind thing, not one good thing, that Bryan would say to help the defor

telephones.

fense.

Pompously Bryan strutted on fat legs, up to the chair reserved for the witness. He was proud of himself and sure of himself. He winked at the audience. They knew what he had in mind and they cheered him. Their champion was going to show up this city slicker, this infidel, this unbeliever.

Darrow began, "You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, Mr. Bryan?" "Yes, I have/' was the reply. "Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally

interpreted?'*

Darrow was asking him

single word

in the Bible were true; to be taken for exactly what it said.

if

every single

if

every

word was

"I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted given there; some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: 'Ye are the salt of the earth/ I would not insist

as it is

man was

actually salt or that he had flesh of salt, but used in the sense of salt as saving God's people." "When you read that the whale swallowed Jonah, how

that it is

do you literally interpret that?"

CLARENCE DARROW Bryan straightened himself in the

165

chair.

"When

I

read

that a big fish swallowed Jonah, I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and

make them both do what he

pleases.

One

miracle

is

just as

easy to believe as another."

Darrow asked, "Do you stand

believe that Joshua

made the sun

still?"

what the Bible

"I believe

says,"

Bryan was beginning not

to like these questions. "I suppose you mean that the earth stood still?"

There was a long pause. Bryan started to answer and then stopped. Finally he said, "I don't know." Thousands of people seemed to gasp all in one breath. It was unbelievable. Bryan had said he didn't know!

The

witness in the chair heard the gasp.

He

hastened to

This heckling by Darrow must stop. "I an talking about the Bryan pounded now. I the Bible Bible, absolutely." He sounded like accept a man running hard and getting slightly out of breath. Darrow's insistent voice went on. "Did you ever read a book on primitive man? Like Tyler's Primitive Culture, or recover his lost ground. the

arm of his chair.

Boaz, or any other great authority?" "I don't think I have read the ones that you have tioned."

men-

"Have you read any?" "Well, I have read a little from time to time. But I didn't pursue it because I didn't know I was to be called as a witness." There was a feeble laugh from the crowd. Darrow moved a step closer to him. "You have never in all

your

made any attempt

life

to find out

about the other

peoples of the earth how old their civilizations are, long they have existed on the earth have you?"

"No,

sir, I

how

have been so well satisfied with the Christian no time trying to find arguments

religion that I have spent

CLARENCE

166

D ARROW

live by it and against it. I have all the information I want to to die by." Darrow let the witness sit there for a while. He wanted

the audience to think about

what had

just

been

said, that

Bryan refused to read about or consider any other civilization the Chinese, the Arabian, the Indian or consider that they might have their own religion and their own

man and the earth. up and down on the narrow platform

theory about the origin of

He

for a walk slowly toward Bryan. The newspapermen came to their feet. This was the famous Darrow walk they saw his thumbs go under his suspenders, his shoulders hunch forward. The lion was boring in for the

paced

moment and then turned

to

kill.

"Do you

think,

Mr* Bryan, that the earth was made in

six days?"

"Well," cautiously, "not six days of twenty-four hours.*' "Doesn't the Bible say so?"

"No,

sir."

Darrow the

first

let that

woman

one

pass.

"Mr. Bryan, do you believe

was Eve?"

"Yes."

"Do you

believe she

was

literally

made out

of

Adam's

rib?" "I do."

"Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?" "No, sir, I leave the agnostics to hunt for her/' There was a big laugh from the crowd and cheers. Their champion was recovering from that one slip; he was back in good form. "Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day?" Darrow paid no attention to the laughter. "Yes."

"And they had evening and morning without "I

am simply saying it is a

period."

the sun?"

CLARENCE DARROW

167

The

audience stirred rather uneasily. They did not like to hear Mr. Bryan evade a direct question like that. "The creation might have been going on for a long time?" "It might have continued for millions of years." There was a loud buzz of talk down below. Arguments broke out and were hushed and broke out again. day was a day, wasn't it? The sun was created on the fourth day what was Bryan saying about millions of years for the crea-

A

That sounded like what that Darwin had said. Perspiration had broken out on Bryan's face. The questions were coming too fast; a man didn't have time to think! "Do you believe the story of the temptation of Eve, by the

tion?

serpent?" "I will believe just what the Bible says. and I will answer."

Read

the Bible

To everyone's surprise Clarence Darrow did just that. He opened the big Bible always ready at the witness chair for the oath-taking; opened it and began to read, lifting his voice so that everyone in the packed audience could hear " him. 'And I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shall bruise his heel. Unto the woman He said, 1 will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.' That is right, is it?"

"I accept

it

as it is."

"

'And God said to the serpent, "Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." Do you think, Mr. Bryan, that is why the serpent is compelled to

/ Darrow read on:

'

crawl

upon

its

belly?"

"I believe that." Bryan shifted uncomfortably

hard chair.

on the

CLARENCE DARROW

168

"Have you any idea of how the snake went before

that

time?"

Bryan was thunderstruck. His mouth gaped open. stared wildly at

Darrow and,

finally,

"No sir/'/ "Do you know whether he walked on "No,

sir. I

Laughter

have no way

rolled

shouting laughter

He

could only mumble, his tail or not?"

to know."

up from

all

at Bryan.

over the lawn, spontaneous,

Darrow had counted on

this.

He knew there was nothing better that plain people of small towns and farms people like himself liked more than to see a man get out on the edge of a limb and then saw it off after him as Bryan had just done. Bryan had claimed to believe everything literally in the Bible. He had claimed that religion was revealed to him. But he did not know.

Judge Raulston ordered that court be adjourned for the day. As his flowing robes disappeared from the platform and into the courthouse, the formality and the dignity of the courthouse square dissolved into a kind of pandemonium. Spectators broke up into a hundred small groups, argu-

ing fiercely.

Bryan stumbled from the witness stand and down the steps to the lawn. He was a changed man from the one who had walked there so confidently a few hours before. There were still many in the crowd who hastened to gather around

him and felt

slap

him on

the change;

the back; but there was

no doubt

that

no doubt he

he knew he had made a fool

of himself.

The next morning the judge ruled that everything Bryan had said the day before should be

The trial was over.

stricken

from the records.

CHAPTER

11

To the jury's surprise the defense lawyers begged them to in with a verdict of guilty for Scopes. The defense case to go to the Supreme Court of Tennessee. the Court could rule not only on the case of Scopes There, on the but Anti-Evolution Law itself and the question of its

come

wanted the

constitutionality. It would take time,

but what had happened there in Dayton would have its profound effect on die whole of American thought. wedge had been firmly driven in between private religious training and public education. It would be difficult, ever again, for one man, one church, one religious

A

thought to impose its faith on a whole community. The Tennessee Supreme Court held that the Anti-Evolution Law was constitutional. But one justice dissented; he did not agree. Darrow was perfectly satisfied with that. As long as one man had the courage to disagree, he knew it would only be a matter of time before the others would and the Law overruled. Even without that official ruling, the Law was dead. Teachers continued to use biology and zoology texts in the Tennessee schools. The town of Dayton went back to its normal life. Its people had not had their faith in the Bible shaken; only their faith in the arrogant righteousness of William Jennings

Bryan.

169

CLARENCE

170

And young John heroism.

go

Scopes?

The Supreme

DARROW

He had had

his

moment

of

Court of Tennessee ruled that he

free.

returned to their home in Chicago. Even was now seventy years old, it was as if the Clarence though trial and the battle had renewed his vigor. Though he began

The Darrows

to take fewer

and fewer law

he and Ruby expanded

cases,

their lives in another direction. "I've seen too

much

of

America from the distorted view-

point of the courtroom. Let's take a look at the real America." And so, with friends and in an old rattletrap Ford (although by this time Paul's business ventures and his own law practice had made Clarence a very comfortable income) they took long holidays, rambling through the highways of the country.

and bypaths

On these trips Clarence never drove;

he had learned most of the mechanics of driving but he could not learn to back a car. He loved to sing: he and Ruby sang their way across the country to Colorado to see Paul and Lillian in Greeley. In old, comfortable clothes no one would have recognized him as the most distinguished lawyer in America; he could easily have been an Ohio farmer and in that role no one was surprised to hear him bellowing "The Bear Went Up

Mountain" or "Onward, Christian Soldiers" as the little Ford rattled through the small towns on their journey. the

In spite of his cynicism, his pessimism, his feeling that the world was a terrible place for human beings to find their way in, he, himself, was a happy man.

Once he confided so

to

Ruby, "If a

man like me could make

mistakes be so imperfect and yet come out of with everything I've got, maybe it isn't such a bad

many

it all

world

after all."

He was his place

thinking of retiring. It was time. Let others take

on the

battlefield.

They

talked of

Europe and

CLARENCE

made see all

D ARROW

their plans, but first they the sights there.

would go

171 to

New York

and

New

York hotel bedroom, after a day of seeing riding up Fifth Avenue on the top of a bus, they decided to skip going to a play that night and rest. "My feet hurt/' Clarence grumbled as he climbed into bed. "Walking around those museums, looking at pictures." The telephone rang. It was the desk clerk: a Mr. Arthur Garfield Hays was downstairs. Should he be sent up? "Send him upl" Clarence ordered. Hays his fellow warrior during the Scopes trial; yes, indeed, Clarence wanted In their

all

the

museums and

"He won't mind if I stay in bed. We don't have be formal with him/' he advised Ruby who was hurrying

to see him. to

to put the room in neat order. Garfield was not alone. He

had brought three men with

up in bed, puzzled. It must be something pretty important for Hays to break in on him like this and bring total strangers into his bedroom.

him. Clarence

sat

Hays introduced one of the men. "Clarence, this is Ar" thur Spingarn Before he could finish, Spingarn was talking; so full of what he had to say and so upset he could not wait to be polite.

"Mr. Darrow, do you know that Doctor Ossian Sweet has been charged with murder?" Darrow's face went gray. He knew of Dr. Sweet. In all of his life, Clarence had broken his rule about not joining political or social groups only once: he had joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was proud of this broken rule and proud of his membership. His father, Amirus Darrow, had been a friend of John Brown.

He had often told his children of how, when

Clarence was not yet three years old, John Brown had stooped over him, stroked his head and said, "Remember,

CLARENCE DARROW

172 little

one

the

Negro has too few

friends;

you and

I

must

never desert him." Darrow had never forgotten. All his life he had fought vigorously by speech and by action for the rights of all people, regardless of their religion, their color, or their nationality. It was not just an ethical question; he believed

whole business of racial prejudice was a lot of tomfool nonsense. But nonsense that, carried to its ultimate

that the

meant lynchings and oppression and discrimination. "Charged with murder? Dr. Sweet?" Clarence knew of the doctor, even though Sweet lived in Detroit. There were not many Negroes, then, who were able to struggle against the inhuman odds to become professional men. Dr. Sweet's lunacy,

reputation was well-known. Spingarn told the story. "He bought a house for his famalmost all white. mob ily. It was in a new neighborhood

A

gathered outside his home; they terrorized the household for a couple of days. Shots were fired no one seems yet to know just who did it but a man across the street fell dead. Now Dr. Sweet is charged with his murder. want you to defend him, Mr. Darrow."

We

way

We

are on protested. "My husband is retired. " to Europe. Surely there must be someone else

Ruby

our

Clarence felt the same way. There must be someone else. Yet he felt for Spingarn. "Yes, I know full well the difficulties faced by your race," he said to the dark, swarthy Spingarn.

Spingarn smiled. "I am not a Negro." Darrow turned to the second stranger who was also very dark. "Well, you understand what I mean." "I am not colored, either," replied Charles Studin. Darrow looked at the third man. This man was blue-eyed, very fair skinned, with blond hair. "I would not make that mistake with you." "I am a Negro." This was Walter White, secretary of the

CLARENCE

D ARROW

173

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Darrow threw off the bedclothes. He stood up and looked them with the belligerent light of combat in his eyes and his words were like a war cry: "That settles itl 111 take the case. I've just had a lesson in my own terms. I've always said that die color of a man's skin was no way to judge a man, think of a man, or divide man from man. If I had been prejudiced and chose people by the color of their skins I would have said to you, Mr. Spingarn, 'you can't sit at my table and eat with me,' and I would have said to you, Mr.

at

White, 'you have a white skin, you can marry my daughter, if I had one.' What an insane business! I wouldn't miss this chance for all the trips in the world; a chance to say a few things about color and race." In Detroit, Clarence visited Dr. Ossian Sweet in jail and was impressed by his intelligence, his dignity and calm and reasonable manner. The story was a tragic one. Dr. Sweet had worked his way through the Medical School of Howard University. He was well-trained; he had worked up a good practice, and he and his wife Gladys had saved thirty-five hundred dollars to buy a home. There was nothing suitable in the small, cramped section that Detroit considered the "Negro section."

The real estate agent had found them one they liked. It was in a white neighborhood, but Negro families lived only one block away. They bought it. The agent assured them there would be no trouble, but Dr. Sweet expected trouble and asked for police protection before moving in. On September eighth, 1925, they moved. Some of the neighbors had seemed friendly; had smiled and talked to the Sweets, but there were a few nasty looks and remarks. Dr. Sweet was sure that once they were living there the neighbors would see that their dark skins were no danger to them; that their

CLARENCE DARROW

174

house and lawn would be as well kept up as any of the others.

Dr. and Mrs. Sweet left their baby with its grandparents. of the doctor's brothers arrived to help with the mov-

Two

ing-in

and two of Gladys' women

friends

came

to assist her

in putting the dishes into cupboards and lining the bureau drawers with fresh paper.

was a happy gathering. Dr. Sweet kept his worries to himself; he knew that other Negro families in Detroit, moving into white neighborhoods, had been brutally handled and driven away. He hoped and prayed there would be no It

trouble here.

When

they were too tired to work any longer they the kitchen table for coffee and cake. They around gathered toasted the new house and the new life for the Sweets. It was while they were sitting there, happily talking, that they had their first indication of trouble. A rock hit the side of the house.

Now they were all silent, listening. They could hear the sound of people outside many people, judging from the swell and roar of voices. Dr. Sweet and his brother, Henry, rushed to the windows. "There must be three or four hundred people out there!" young Henry said in a hushed, awed, horrified voice. They could see two policemen walking up and down the sidewalks but they were making no effort to disperse the crowd. Another rock was thrown. Two of the women in the house The men hastily pulled down the blinds. They once more gathered in the kitchen, speaking in low terms, trying to think what to do. They made improvised beds on

screamed.

the floors of the rooms

and tried to sleep,

seeined to be protection.

Nothing

fitfully.

The police

serious could really

happen. The next morning they were overjoyed. The crowd had gone. Everything was peaceful. Dr. and Mrs, Sweet went

CLARENCE

downtown

to

D ARROW

do some shopping.

When

175 they returned three

were waiting at the house for them. "There's talk all over town they are out to get you, Ossian," they told him. "We're here to help. Any way you want friends

you want to leave, well move your furniture you want to stay, well stay with you." it.

If

out. If

"I'm staying," Dr. Sweet said, quietly. "I'm not going to be driven off. This is my home. I have a right to live anywhere in America I choose, or democracy is a word without

meaning."

had gathered outside again. The been added to by Dr. Sweet's brothers. Again the family put out all the lights except the one in the kitchen; the house was in a state of siege. Rocks and stones were thrown against the walls. In spite of their determination and courage it was a night of terror and Dr. Sweet could feel that all of them were infected by it. The mob was screaming insults at them and

By

little

nightfall the crowd forces inside had

threats.

"Get your gun, Henry," Dr. Sweet ordered, "If they coine we have a right to defend ourselves and protect Gladys." Suddenly a big stone crashed through the bedroom winat the window, saw a quick movement of the crowd, a tidal flow coming like a wave toward the house: hundreds of screaming, distorted, furious faces rushing toward him. He grabbed his gun. He fired high over the heads of the crowd, to let them know that those inside were armed. More shots rang out. Dr. Sweet also fibred, high. But the last shots came from outside; he could only figure that the police were firing into the mob, to stop them.

dow upstairs. Henry,

Aiid the shots did stop the surge. From a mob coming with one single, directed purpose it became a mass of people

each with his

own

self-preservation in

mind

to get

away

fast.

When they had

all

gone and the

street

was empty, there

CLARENCE DARROW

176

were two

still

figures lying

on the pavement. One man was

dead, the other injured. All of the people in the house were arrested. Dr. Sweet

and

his brother

Henry were charged with murder. Dr.

Sweet's charge was later changed to that of being an accessory but Henry was still to be held for murder.

The first thing Darrow did was to get Mrs. Sweet released on

bail.

It

seemed

for a time that the others

would

sit

in

jail,

indefinitely. No judge wanted to take the case. It was too hot. There were not only those in Detroit so aroused that

they would be satisfied only with the death penalty for Henry Sweet; there were the opposite and growing numbers who were equally determined that the Sweets were not to suffer for the actions of

a maddened mob.

One

of Darrow's failings had always been his reluctance to believe that his cases could be helped by people outside

the courtroom. Eugene Debs, Haywood,

with him about

many

others

had

blind spot. It was his own individualistic of way of doing supremely part that mass not that he would recognize meetings of things trade unionists influenced public opinion and, finally, influenced a judge. But in the Sweet case he was forced to realize that out-

had

fierce disputes

this

were doing work not even he could do. If it hadn't been for the people of Detroit, black and white, who went from door-to-door talking and convincing, who held huge

siders

rallies in support of the prisoners in jail, there might easily have arisen a lynch spirit in Detroit that would have taken

the Sweets from their cells to their death.

Judge Frank Murphy courageously agreed to hear the trial.

Darrow's defense strategy for the

trial was simple there was no possible way of ever knowing whether the shot that had killed had come from inside the house or from a police-

CLARENCE DARROW

177

man's gun. The trial would be won or lost on how he, Darrow, could persuade the jury that a Negro had the right to buy a house wherever he chose; had the right to live in it; and the right to defend it. Just as they, themselves, would assert that right if they

had been

so threatened.

There would not be enough time to do this during the Each juror would bring into that courtroom a

trial itself.

background of his own prejudice. So Darrow concentrated almost all his efforts on a process which in a trial is usually a cut-and-dried preliminary affair;

As each prospective juror came up be questioned with only twelve to be actually chosen Darrow spent hours with him, instead of the usual few the selection of the jury.

to

minutes.

"Do you know

anything, sir, about the history of the in America?" Negro people The juror looked confused, "No. I don't think so."

"Have you never heard of Frederick Douglass? No? Have you ever heard of a Negro named Banneker? No? Well, Banneker was the genius who helped plan the whole design of the city of Washington, D. C. Do you know that the first American to fall in the American Revolution in battle for the new little country of America was a Negro soldier? Crispus Attucks?

Now,

about that great " Douglass

The

go back while I tell you a little of American history, Frederick

let's

man

prosecuting attorney was on his

I protest.

Mr. Darrow

is

feet.

"Your Honor,

not questioning the jurors; he

is

trying to instruct them." Judge Murphy smiled. "I see nothing

wrong with what Mr. Darrow is doing. He has as much right to select the jury as you do and he has the right to do it in his own way." On and on Darrow went, taking each juror in whom he saw the least spark of interest, through the history of the Negro people,

their accomplishments, their great struggle

CLARENCE DARROW

178

against tremendous odds to educate themselves, their rights

citizens. His manner was fatherly. He was each forcing juror to drag out of himself prejudices he had never examined before in the light of real truth and knowledge. Could they call themselves religious men, believe in God, and yet hate a fellowman that God had created?

as full

American

Arthur Garfield Hays was sitting at the defense table. He had agreed to join in the case with Darrow. Now he marveled at the tremendous grasp of history his colleague was displaying, and also his understanding of the psychology of men. Darrowtfas taking an ordinarily routine matter the questioning, rejecting and accepting of men for jury duty and turning it into a schoolroom for social ideas. When the twelve men were finally chosen, Darrow and

Hays agreed: "The

window

case

is

won

or lost now.

The

rest is

dressing."

There were two

The

twelve

went

free.

men

trials.

The

first

resulted in a

hung

jury.

The

second trial was a dear victory of "Not Guilty." Henry Sweet and the others could not agree.

Not

in all his long career had Clarence Darrow been so happy over the winning of a case. Others were to agree that this was his best, his finest, his supreme performance in any courtroom. After it was all over Judge Murphy summed up his

own

feelings

and spoke for millions of others when he

said:

"This is the greatest experience of my life. That was Clarence Darrow at his best. I will never hear anything like it again. He is the most Christlike man I have ever known."

CHAPTER

a i

H 1 a

12

The old man was tired of the law. He had a new toy, a new interest in life and he intended to spend the rest of his days with it. He had become a writer. Magazine editors had been after him for years to write articles on his highly controversial ideas.

wrote against capital punishment. He wrote articles which were approved neither by socialists nor antisocialists. Together with a man named Wallace Rice he compiled a book called Infidels and Heretics, An Agnostic's Anthology which was torn to pieces by the critics. He chuckled. He could still plunge his hands into the waters

He

on

socialism

and

the depths. He wrote his autobiography. He still loved to lecture and debate. He argued religion, sociology, human values all across the continent and everystir

up

where he went he drew great crowds. Then it was 1928 and the Great Depression. Banks failed. Thousands and thousands of people were out of work; there was hunger and starvation; small businesses crashed and only a few great corporations survived to become larger than ever. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had set up many committees to study the situation and see what could be done.

179

CLARENCE

180

D ARROW

In 1933 the National Recovery Act was passed. It was deof General Hugh signed to stabilize prices. It was the theory S. Johnson, administrator of the National Recovery Act, that the

Act would

set prices at a certain figure;

no one

lower than that price; plants would reopen when they saw they could sell their goods at a figure which would

could

insure

sell

them a reasonable

profit.

For a while it seemed to work. Businessmen who had been frightened and had withdrawn their money from certain industries, now felt they could safely put it back. A few plants opened; some men were hired back. But there were protests. Small business claimed the Act was unfair to them and favored the big companies. President Roosevelt felt there should be an impartial inquiry into it and he wanted someone from outside the tight Washington political surveys. He cast about him for a man to do the job and decided upon Clarence Darrow. It was a very great honor and a greater responsibility. General Hugh Johnson met the Darrows, Clarence and Ruby, in Washington. He was amazed knowing that Clarence was approaching his seventy-seventh birthday at the keenness of the questions Clarence put to him, and annoyed because the old man would not be told what to do and how to

do it

up an

office for you, right next door to mine. Supplies and a stenographer are all arranged for/' said Johnson. "I think it would be helpful if you reported to me

"I've fixed

every few days and let

me know

if

the

NRA

codes are all

right, from your investigating." "But suppose," Clarence objected, mildly, "I find out the codes are all wrong?" Johnson looked astounded. They were his codes. "Well of course report to me whatever you find." As soon as Johnson left, Darrow went to see President Roosevelt. He was ushered into the President's private office

CLARENCE DARROW

181

without waiting, ahead of those who already had appointments, and was greeted with warm respect. "I am very grateful to you for agreeing to take on such a responsibility, Mr. Darrow," the President told him. "There have been complaints that the N.R.A. works only for Big Business. I am determined that this government will work equally and fairly for all and I think the N.R.A. codes are fair. It will be up to you to investigate and find out if they are."

Darrow

told

him

of his conversation with Johnson. "Mr. able men to

President, I have assembled a board of review

help do this job. Are

we

to have a free hand? It seems to

me

something wrong about our working under, and reporting to, the very man whose codes are now being that there

is

held up to question/' Roosevelt was quick to see the picture. "You have a free hand. Conduct your hearings in our own way. And when

you have made your findings, bring them to me. They will be a matter of public record. You will not report to Mr. Johnson."

Darrow and his review board opened "office" in Darrow's hotel room. Just as soon as the word got around that

own

the review board was open to receive complaints, they

poured in by personal calls, by telegrams, by letters, by visits from small businessmen all over the country. The board worked night and day; they moved to four large rooms in the Willard Hotel and, at the end of the third week, into fourteen

offices

in a nearby office building.

The staff grew away who wished

Darrow would not turn anyone the other attorneys on the board. Then, fearing that he was getting a one-sided picture, he went out to find those who did not have complaints and for whom the N.R.A. price stabilization codes were working well. Darrow worked

larger.

to see

like a

him or

man

twenty years old.

When

the

CLARENCE DARROW

182

other members of the board were ready to quit for the day, drooping with exhaustion, Clarence was still going strong. He seemed to be able to exist without sleep and without

much

food. His eyes

were bright,

his color good,

and he

walked with a quick, vigorous step. At the end of three months of private and public hearto President ings, the Review Board handed in its report Roosevelt. It was decidedly not in favor of the codes. General Hugh Johnson was in a thundering rage. Supporters of the N.R.A. damned Darrow; those against it

him as a national hero. Newsweek magazine wrote: "Another sign of the nation's upturn is that Clarence Darrow is on one of his peculiarly cool and deadly rampages again. As a foreman of a kind of hailed

governmental grand jury to tell the administration how the N.R.A. is working, he has brought in a report saying it's doing perfectly terribly. Last week Washington sat forward nervously to see

how many

holes that particular

bomb

would tear in New Deal pavements. Meanwhile Mr. Darrow sat back, hitched his fingers in under his gallus straps and looked on with that amazing mixture of cynicism, compassion and incredibly brilliant intelligence that is his character."

When

asked by newspapermen what was wrong with the codes, Darrow told them that, in order to stabilize prices and give more work, the N.R.A. had simply handed big business a monopoly. That if it continued it would soon destroy all small and independent business, and would ulti-

mately leave both labor and power completely in the hands of the monopolies. Under the N.R.A. big business had the right to fix prices. This wiped out competition. So much furor was raised by his report that in March of

1935 Darrow was called before the Senate Investigating

CLARENCE

DARROW

183

Committee. After he had given them facts and figures, he felt he had a right to give them some of his opinions, too. "The concentration of wealth is going on, and it looks almost as if there were nothing to stop it. If we do not destroy it there will be nothing but masters and slaves left

we get much further along." senator asked him: "Do you think

before

A

tute for

there

is

any

substi-

economic laws?"

Darrow snorted. "I am not sure at all about economic laws. I do not think they are like the laws of gravity. I think we will find that most of them have been made by human bfeings and pretty human at that. They think the Almighty meant that they should be rich and the great mass of people When they get so that they can put should be poor themselves in other peoples' places and suffer because they

we will probably get rid of most of these inequalities, but whether they will ever get there I do not know 1 think it is possible that we will have a better situation a few hundred years from now." On his seventy-ninth birthday he went back to Kinsman, Ohio, and he showed Ruby the home where he had been born, the country lanes where he had once walked barefoot, the streams he had fished, the rough plot of ground where he had hit his first home run and been cheered as the school's first baseman. They drove to the schoolhouse where he had, at sixteen, taken on a man's job and he remembered how scared he had been at the bully who wanted to fight him. How many fights he had talked his way into and out of He had been waiting for so many years for justice and brotherhood to win out over cruelty and injustice. Now it was later than he thought. He was to see the N.R.A. codes broken and revoked by the government. He saw his country slowly pulling itself out of the depression. But time was running out for him.

suffer,

1

CLARENCE DARROW

184

He

He

was almost eighty-one

body

lay at rest in a funeral

died on March 13, 1938.

years old.

For two days and nights

his

left open all that parlor in Chicago; the doors had to be to pay their wanted who the to accommodate time people the lines stretched last respects to Clarence Darrow. All day

mourners slowly inched their way up the pavement, waiting patiently for their turn to go in and say good-by to him. He would have been astounded if he could have seen for blocks

and

his

them. not the McNamara case turned the trade unions against him? Yet here came trade union leaders, rank and file workers miners, steel workers, carpenters, bricklayers,

Had

woodworkers men who remembered the great victories and the defeats of Clarence Darrow had weighed them in the balance and found him still their friend. They came in overalls, carrying their lunch pails right from their jobs. Had he not railed against the iniquities of Big Business? Yet here were his first employers on the Chicago and North Western Railway; here were wealthy men from all over the nation.

Had he

not been an agnostic? Argued against religion? John Haynes Holmes, minister of the Community Church of New York, wrote of him:

"Darrow was

... a pessimist

heart which could exclude no

and unbeliever, but he had a

man from its sympathy.

In his he demonstrated the reality of the religion which he denied. This world was to him a mad and cruel world. There was no sense nor sanity in it. Especially was there no pity. But men needed pity, just because they were living

own

life

helplessly in such a world. And this pity Darrow himself proposed to supply. Thereupon appeared in action such a

mankind has seldom known. There were no Darrow's compassion. It reached everywhere,

piteous heart as limits

to

CLARENCE DARROW

185

touched every life. The underdog was his special friend, the downtrodden and the oppressed his brethren, the outcast and wretched and despised his loved ones. Not since has there such an been o the gospel himself, Jesus exemplar .

of 'unto this last/ To his funeral

ute to the

"

came Negro

man who had

racial prejudice. Mingling tears

. .

leaders to

fought in his

pay their

last trib-

own way

against

with the most prominent statesmen of the

land, leading members of the law, outstanding liberals, there were also those who sat beside them in rags: the un-

fortunate derelicts of Skid Row who had always known that Darrow would defend them in court or slip them a dollar bill on the streets of Chicago. It

was indeed an incredible

sight.

Judge Holly preached the funeral oration: "It is a magnificent thing that Clarence Darrow lived. In Clarence Darrow's heart was infinite pity and mercy for the poor, the oppressed, the weak and the erring all races, all colors, all creeds, all humankind." Alone that night in the apartment, Ruby was comforted. It was to her, in a very special way, a "magnificent thing that Clarence Darrow lived." She looked at the old wicker rocking chair next to the fireplace which had been "Clarence's" chair. It seemed to her she could see him sitting there, grinning at her in his sardonic way and saying as he had once said at a big dinner given in his honor: I

"I'm the one all this talk's been about. I always thought was a heck of a fellow, and now I'm sure of it."

BIBLIOGRAPHY Altgeld,

John

Live Questions: Including Chicago, 1890.

Peter.

Its Victims.

Our Penal Machinery and

The Masked War. George Doran Co., New York* 1913. Cohen, Morris R. Law and the Social Order. Harcourt, Brace and Co., Burns, William

New York,

J.

1933.

The Bending Cross. William Haywood, Dudley. Ball Hay wood's Book. International Publishers,

Ginger, Ray.

New

York, 1929.

Hicks, Frederick C.

Famous American Jury

Speeches.

West Publishing

Co,,

1925.

Julius-Haldeman, Marcet. Clarence Darrow's Books, 1927. Lindsey, Almont cago, 1942.

The Pullman

Poole, Ernest. Giants

House,

New

Gone: The

Men Who Made

Trials.

Chicago

Blue

Press, Chi-

Chicago. Whittlesey

York.

Henry Justin. Chicago, A Irving* Clarence Darrow

Stone, Co., Inc.,

Great

Strike. University of

Rowan, Richard Wilxner. The Pinkertons, Brown and Co., Boston, 193L Smith,

Two

New

Portrait.

A

Detective Dynasty. Little,

The Century

Co., Chicago, 1931.

for the Defense. Doubleday,

Doran and

York, 1941.

Steffens,

New

Books by Clarence Darrow Crime, Its Cause and Treatment. Thomas Y. Crowell Company,

New

Joseph Lincoln. Autobiography. Harcourt, Brace and Co., York, 1931. Letters. Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York.

York, 1922. Infidels and Heretics (with Wallace Rice).

The

Stratford Press, Bos-

ton, 1929.

A Persian Pearl and The The

Other Essays. The Stratford Co., Boston, 1931. Prohibition Mania. Boni and Liveright, New York, 1927. Story of My Life. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1932.

Pamphlets by Clarence Darrow Arguments in Defense of Communists, 1920. Closing Argument in the Haywood Case. Plea in His Own Defense to the Jury at Los Angeles.

187

INDEX

Adams, Steve, 105 Addams, Jane, 31 Altgeld, John Peter,

Amalgamated Woodworkers* International Union, 60-63; United Mine 21-23, 28-30, 37, 42,

48-49, 69-70

Amalgamated Woodworkers International Union, 61-63 American Civil Liberties Union, 155-56 American Federation of Labor, 110, 113, 115, 122

American Railway Union,

41-42, 46-56

Andover, Ohio, 14, 19 Ann Arbor, Michigan, 13 Anti-Evolution Law, 155, 160-61, 169 Ashtabula, Ohio, 17-24, 33, 35, 40 Attucks, Crispus, 177 Austria, 139 Bailey, Mr., 136, 138

Banneker, Benjamin, 177 The, 152, 154, 155, 156-57, 161-

Bible,

62, 163, 164-68 Bissett,

George, 130

Boise, Idaho, 79, 82-103. 105, 124 Bordwell, Judge, 122-23, 125 Brown, John, 171

Browne, City Detective, 126 Bryan, William Jennings, 151-169 Burns Detective Agency, 116 Burns, Robert, 57 Caldwell, Idaho, 79, 82, 83 California, 105-06 Campbell, City Detective, 126

Workers, 70-74; William Haywood and Western Federation of Miners, 76103; Steve Adams, 105; George Pettibone, 105-06; James and John McNamara, 110-12$; Clarence Darrow, 126-134; Communist Labor Party, 141-43; son of state examiner, 143-44; Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, 144-49; John T. Scopes, 151-170; Dr.

Ossian and Henry Sweet, 172-78

Cavanaugh,

Billy,

96-97,

99,

124-25,

129 Caverly, Judge, 147-49 Chandler, Mr., 110, 112, 115, 118, 121122, 124 Chattanooga Daily Times, 160

Chicago and North Western Railway, 38-40, 45-46

Chicago Evening Post, 69 Illinois, 12, 21, 25-40, 41-56, 57-60, 63-70, 76, 78, 104, 108-111, 135150, 170, 184-85 Civic Biology, Hunter's, 155

Chicago,

Cleveland, President, 42, 49

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, 83, 94 Henry, 71-73 Collins, Goodrich and Vincent, 57 Coll,

Colorado, 49, 76-78, 80, 93, 111, 170 Commentaries on the Laws of England, Blackstone's, 11

Carlyle, Thomas, 57 Carter, Justice Orrin, 143 Case, Dr. Shirley, 157-58

Communist Labor Party, 141-43 Community Church of New York, 184

Cases of Clarence Darrow, in defense of

DeWitt C., 36-37 "Cross of Gold" speech, 155 Cumberland Mountains, 151

Pullman strikers, 46-50; Eugene Debs and American Railway Union, 50-56;

"Cooperative Living Club," 64 Creiger,

CLARENCE DARROW

190

Darrow, Amirus, 12-13, 16-17, 21, 24, 171-72

Darrow, Clarence, as schoolteacher, 712; is

studying law, 12; his parentage,

12-15, 16-17; attends

works in lawyer's attorney, 14; his

13;

heads presidential survey, 180-82; re-

licensed

turns to boyhood home, 183; death, 184; tributes to, 184-85

law school,

office, 13; is first case,

Trial, 151-170; description of, 157, 161; character of, 158; on auto trip, 170; thinks of retiring, 170; takes Sweet case, 173-78; as a writer, 179;

15;

mar-

17; is City Solicitor, 17; as attorney in Ashtabula, 18-24; his son, 19; misses intellectual stimulation, 20, 26; moves to Chicago, 25; tries to

Darrow, Everett,

new practice, 27-28, 30, 32-33, 35-36; meets John Altgeld, 28-30; at-

Darrow, Lillian, 137, 170 Darrow, Mary (sister) , 12 Darrow, Mary (granddaughter) , 137 Darrow, Paul, 19, 22, 25, 30, 35, 37, 44,

riage,

build

tends Sunset

dub

meetings, 31, 37,

39-40, 41; character of, 32; speaks at Henry George Club, 33*35; works

for city of Chicago, 36-38; is attorney for railway, 39; makes name for himself,

40; is aroused

by Pullman Strike,

41-42; represents railway union, 4656; as speaker and lecturer, 57-58, 60;

divorced, 59; friendship with Hamlin Garland, 59-60; represents woodis

workers'

union,

61-63;

starts

own

he and son become good companions, 64, 65; meets Ruby, 66;

firm, 63;

courtship of, 67-69; represents United Mine Workers, 70-74; marries again, 75; defends Haywood, 78-103; has infected ear, 104; collapses in court, 105; operation successful, 107; helps son financially, 108-09; defends MeNamara brothers, 110-123; is shad-

owed by

detectives, 113;

friendship with Lincoln Steffens, 115; his telephone tapped, 116; concocts secret code, 116; changes clients' plea, 12223; is target of mob, 123-24; is accused of selling out, 125; is charged

with conspiracy of bribing juror, 126-27;

loses

self-confidence,

129;

aroused by offers of help, 130-31; pleads his own defense, 131-34; found not guilty, 134; his character changes, 135; as lecturer, 135-36; goes back to law, 137; protests Overthrow Act,

Communist Labor Party, 141-43; takes Leopold-Loeb case, 14449; friends against him, 145; analysis

141; defends

of, 149-50;

defense attorney in Scopes

12-13, 21, 25-26, 30, 33, 35, 58-59, 108

Darrow,

Jessie, 14-18, 20-25, 28, 30, 35, 37, 42-43, 44, 58-59, 149

58-59, 64, 65, 108-09, 110, 111, 137, 149, 170

Darrow, Ruby, 66-69, 75,

83, 88, 91-92,

96-97, 99, 100, 102, 104-07, 109-110,

11M2,

114-16, 124, 127, 129, 131, 134-35, 139, 152-154, 170-72, 180, 185

Darrow and Sissman, 144 Darrow, Sissman and Bailey, 137-38

Dartmouth

College, 65, 108

Darwin, Charles, 155 Davis, Le Compte, 113, 117-19, 123 Dayton, Tennessee, 151-169 Debs, Eugene, 41, 4344, 47, 50-56, 57, 87, 112

Denver, Colorado, 76-77, 79, 93 Detroit, Michigan, 172-178 Dickens, Charles, 40 Dostoevski, 31 Douglass, Frederick, 177

Europe, 75, 139, 170 Evolution Club, 109 Flaubert, 23 Franklin, Bert, 114, 125-26, 132-33 Fredericks, Prosecuting Attorney, 116, 120, 126

Galesburg, Illinois, 69 Gardner, Frederick D., 130-31 Garland, Hamlin, 58-59 Garrick Theatre, 136 General Managers' Association, 45, 55 George, Henry, 23, 33-34, 35, 37

Germany, 139

CLARENCE DARROW 113, 125

Gompers, Samuel, 110-111,

Greeley, Colorado, 109, 110, 1S7, 170 Gregg, John H., 66

Gregg, Mrs., 68 Grosscup, Judge, 53-55

Haldeman-Julius, Mrs., 156, 158

Hamerstrom, Ruby. See Barrow, Ruby Harriman, Job, 113, 117, 119, 122, 125 Haymarket anarchists, 69 Hays, Arthur Garfield, 156, 171, 178 Haywood, William "Big Bill," 76-82, 84-87, 92, 93-104, 105, 106, 112

Hell and the High Schools, 154 Henry George Club, 26, 32-35 Hercules Powder Plant, 118-19, 120 Holly, Judge, 185

Holmes, John Haynes, 184

An

Heretics,

Miller, Fred, 94 Mitchell, John, 70, 74-75, 84-85

Morgan, Howard, 162 Moyer, Charles H., 77-78,

79, 81, 82,

84, 88, 93, 101, 106

Murphy, Judge Frank, 176-77 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 171, 172-73 National Recovery Act (NJLA.) , 180-

Nietzche, 144

Ohio, 14, 26 Ohls, Jessie. See Darrow, Jessie Agnostic's

and Structural

Hugh J.,

67, 171

Nugent, John, 94, 102

Iron Workers, 113 Johnson, General

Merchants* and Manufacturers' Association, 115, 124

New York City, Newsweek, 182

Idaho, 77-79, 80, 85, 101, 105 Illinois, 111, 143-44 Independence, 81, 82, 93 Indiana, 113 Indianapolis, Indiana, 111

Anthologyf 179 International Bridge

McNutt, Judge, 113, 119 McParland, James, 74, 84-85, 89, 95 Malone, Dudley Field, 156, 160-61 Markle Company, 71-73

Neal, John Randolph, 156, 160 New Hampshire, 65

Hull House, 30 Hutton, Judge, 134

and

McNamara, James, 110-125 McNamara, John J., 110-125

82,183

Howard University, 173 Hughitt, Marvin, 45-46

Infidels

191

180-82

Omar Khayyam,

65 Orchard, Harry, 79-80, 82, 84-85, 8893, 95-104, 105 Oregon, 49 Origin of the Species, 155 Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 60

Overthrow Act, 140-43 Kansas, 49, 81

Kinsman, Ohio,

10, 12, 13,

Langdon Apartments, 64 Leopold, Nathan, 144-49 "Little Blue Books," 156 Live Questions: Including

183

Our Penal

Machinery and Its Victims, 21-22, 29 Lockwood, Mr., 132 Loeb, Richard, 144-49

Los Angeles, California, 106, 110-134 Los Angeles Times, 110, 112-14, 118, 121-22

McKinley, President, 31 McManigal, Ortie, 110

Paine, George M., 60-62 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 141 Palmer Raids, 142-43 Peabody, Governor, 92-93

Pennsylvania, 70 Pettibone, George, 79, 81, 84, 88, 92, 93, 101, 105-06 Pinkerton Detective Agency, 74 Potter, Dr. Charles F., 156 Primitive Culture, Tyler's, 165

Pullman, George, 41, 47, 54-55

Pullman

strike,

41-56

Rathdrum, Idaho, 105 Raulston, Judge, 159-60, 163-64, 168

CLARENCE DARROW

192

Revolutionary War, 177 Rhea County Courthouse, 158-165 Rice, Wallace, 179 Richards, Judge, 21 Richardson, Edmund, 78-80, 95, 95, 9798, 102 Rockford,

Illinois,

Street Bridge, 68

Russia, 140

San Francisco, California, 118-19, 120 Scopes, John T., 151, 155, 154-56, 15960, 162, 165, 169-70

Scopes Trial, The, 151-170 Scott, Joseph, 115-14, 118

Washington, 94

Senate Investigating Committee, 18285 Shakespeare, 40 Shame of the Cities, The, 115

Sherman, Judge, Silver City, 94

19,

United Mine Workers, 70-74 United States Government, 41-56, 70-74,

Vernon, Ohio, 10 Voltaire, 65

Waldcn's Ridge, 151 Walker, Edwin, 45 Washington, D.C., 75, 177, 180, 182 Western Federation of Mines, 77-104 White, Walter, 172-75

White City Club, 65-66 Whitman, Walt, 25, 156 Willard Hotel, 181 Wilson, Edgar, 85-85, 88, 89, 91, 92,

27

silver-tongued orator. See Bryan, Wil-

liam Jennings Sissman, Peter, 156-58, 145, 149-50 Spingarn, Arthur, 171-75 Springfield, Illinois, 42, 48 Steftens, Lincoln, 115, 118, 126, 128

Tennessee, 151, 155-58, 160-61, 169 Texas, 49 Thompson, William O., 65

140-42 University of Chicago, 157

Louis, Missouri, 150 St. Thomas, Morris, 65 St.

Seattle,

57,58 Sweet, Gladys, 175-76 Sweet, Henry, 174-76, 178 Sweet, Dr. Ossian, 171-176, 178

HI

Rogers, Earl, 127, 129, 151 Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 179182 Roosevelt, President Theodore, 70

Rush

Studin, Charles, 172 Sunset Club, 26, 50-51, 57, 59, 40, 44,

95, 95, 97, 102 Wilson, Francis S., 64 Wilson, Mrs. 84. 99, 104 Wilson, President Woodrow, 159 Wisconsin, 60, 64

Wood, Judge Fremont, 119,

121,

Woods, Judge, 56

World War

Steunenberg, Frank, 78-80, 82, 85-84, 86,

87,95

Zola,

25

I,

159

94-95, 102-05